Four questions for Rob Lane of Overlay.tv

Here is a four question interview that we did recently with Rob Lane of Overlay.tv.  Rob is very active in the Ottawa startup and social media communities and he knows what it takes to get a startup off the ground.  To find out what he is up to right now you can always follow him on twitter @roblane.  Enjoy the interview… [MORE]

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Commercialising Online Videos & Other Digital Media By Tim Tang

According to ComScore, 3 billion videos were streamed on YouTube in January 2008. YouTube has not released the cost of streaming these videos, but here are the facts in Google’s 2007 Annual Report. [MORE]

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EMERGING VIDEO MONETIZATION TECHNIQUES by Adrian Keys 

While many advertisers may think Google and YouTube are the only game in video monetization the past year has seen many new options crop up. While most advertisers seem stuck in the land of pre- and post-roll ads, some cutting edge publishers have gained revenue using new technologies preferred by consumers for their less intrusive delivery. [MORE]

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Overlay.TV is proud to preview the first episode of The OverView (click for all episodes) with Amber MacArthur, our new weekly series for online video fans.  Enjoy and be sure to leave any suggestions or feedback in the comments.

In this embed I have disabled the create, on/off function, and carousel to give an example of a cleaner implementation of our player.

Thanks for watching!

creator · eepybird · lighting · online · overlay · Overlay.TV · overview · stickynotes · The OverView · Video · viral

Highlights from Red Herring Canada 08

September 19th, 2008 by Francis

I already wrote a post at Dangletech.com, where I try to contribute weekly, about the most fascinating highlight the Red Herring Canada 08 conference held earlier this week at Mont Tremblant. For my money, the best entertainment was the riveting behaviour of Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux who dominated the event with his bewildering mix of brilliant observation, insightful analysis and boorish, insulting and condescending treatment of those who paid big bucks to attend. [MORE]

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OverlayTV: television you can mashup

find the whole concept of OverlayTV game-changing, not just for the television industry that packages and pipes content, but to anyone looking far out enough to see where interactive media is headed. [MORE]

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Overlay.TV named top Canadian Business at Red Herring Awards

OTTAWA, Sept. 17 /CNW Telbec/ - Overlay.TV, an Canadian startup determined to change the face of video advertising on the web was honoured yesterday at the first annual Red Herring Top 50 Awards in Mont Tremblant as the Ottawa-based company walked away with the top prize. The nominees were evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy and integration into their ecosystem.  [MORE]

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One of the overlooked features of Overlay.TV is how easy it is to integrate us with your existing analytics package, be it Omniture, FireClick or any package that utilizes transparent gifs to deliver the tracking pixel.  This can be done in a couple of minutes to any video, and of course you have the option of adding other widgets to the same video (product, clipart, text, etc).

To do this you first need to generate the report or goal in your analytics package and determine the increments of engagement.  For example, if you have a 3 minute video, you probably want to measure how many people made it to 1 minute, 2 minutes and 3 minutes respectively.  Whatever page you embed the video in will record the number of views the player gets, and the player itself will measure how many people hit play.  This last stat is available in any Overlay.TV video by clicking on the info pane at the bottom right.

Once you have generated the 3 pixels, you simply advance your video to the appropriate point in the timeline and open the Link widget.  In the Image field, paste in your transparent pixel.  Complete this for each of the pixels you have created.  Now you go ahead and embed your video in your page, start building traffic, and let the pixel and your analytics package do the rest.  To get the most of your experiment I would create a custom report that graphs usage statistic across the 3 pixels.  This will measure drop-off engagement etc.

If you are using other widgets like the products in our affiliate catalogues I would suggest placing them near that pixel, either right before or right after based on what you want to measure or understand better.  This will then give you a map between engagement and revenue or referrals, which will make your report even more powerful from an ROI perspective.

I am planning on building an example of this with a report - so if you would like me to do it to your video, leave a comment here with a link to your video and a way to contact you and I will work with you on this.   If you have other ideas or analytics issues you are trying to sort out, let me know and I would be more than willing to work with you on them.

analytics · engagement · tracking pixel · Video

Social networking online comes back to bite users by Julie Beun-Chown, For Canwest News Service

It's the kind of story usually dismissed as urban legend -- but this time, it's true.

In June, 20-year-old Joshua Lipton was found guilty over a drunk driving incident that seriously injured another driver.

That he was charged wasn't surprising. What was shocking was that the prosecutor in the case found an incriminating Facebook picture of Lipton at a Halloween party held two weeks after the accident, showing him dressed as a jailbird and sticking out his tongue. In court, the prosecutor offered it as evidence of Lipton's unrepentant ways. The judge concurred and gave the Rhode Island man a two-year sentence. [MORE]

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Overlay.tv: quick media overlay video embeddable creation by Avatar

Overlay.tv surprised me. when i first read about it, i thought it was like the lite version of PLYmedia. IT IS. but that turned out to be a great thing. Overlay.tv offers media overlay integration to video embeddables (video widgets) timed to the video. the media in question can be text, graphics, short video, photos and links. this makes it display the overlay content just in the same way viddler displays its video comments as the video rolls. what overlay.tv created was to make a application that resembles the simplicity of Windows Movie Maker, but for the web and that you output in flash video embeddables. that is of course the intention of it because it will feel familiar and anyone will know how to use it just by looking at it.  [MORE]

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