When you look at online marketing around the world, various regional differences and strengths begin to emerge.  The U.S. is the clear winner when it comes to social media and big interactive experiences, but it's the U.K. that leads the pack with a clear focus on eCommerce from more than a few big players.

Marketing Magazine (UK) recently posted an intriguing article on how luxury brands such as Selfridges and Faberge are now starting to cultivate an online retail space. Their approach, however, was not just to sell products online, but to create an experience that is as close to being in a real store as possible.

Being luxury brands, their stores are designed, decorated and lit to show off just that - luxury. Their websites are intended to be no different, but great design is only a piece of the puzzle. These brands need to give their discerning customers great service as well, and that means live people, available 24 hours a day by video, phone and chat.  It means being able to see every product in painstaking detail.  After all, if you're buying a piece of jewellery worth more than a condo in Manhattan, you're probably going to want to give it a bit more than a passing glance.

Of course, if your clientele knows that if they have to ask how much something in your store is, they can't afford it, this move is a no-brainer.  But the thing is, great experience is no longer only for the biggest marketing budgets, so there's nothing stopping smaller shops from giving a luxury experience online. In fact, as more and more competition drives down the price to the lowest point it can go, the only thing we'll have left to compete on online is experience and service.

A fifteen million dollar diamond-encrusted egg is a luxury. A brilliant eCommerce experience is just the cost of doing business.

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Welcome to the new and improved Overlay.TV. Over the past couple of weeks our team has been diligently working away to give our site a new facelift. Our goal for the re-design, based in part on community feedback, was to make information more accessible for people with business and development interests, while still maintaining the UGC aspects of our site.

The hompage now has three options to choose from: Creators, Business and Developers with each of these sections providing more information specific to your needs, including features and benefits, demos, downloadable PDFs and contact info.  There is also a promo video explaining what we do and showcases how clickable video can enhance your audience's viewing pleasure.  As always we welcome your thoughts and feedback regarding our site changes and encourage you to leave them here or on our official Twitter page @OverlayTV.

Ahhhh ... now that's refreshing!

Special Thanks to The Anybody for graciously allowing Overlay.TV to use their music for our promo video.

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 We are always looking for ways to make things easier and more efficient for our users here at Overlay.TV, and we have developed a new app we think will do just that. It's called the YouTube Uploader, developed with our friends at Nitobi, and it makes uploading videos to YouTube and creating Overlays on them super quick and easy. Simply install the app and uploading your videos to YouTube is as easy as a drag and drop, and you can start creating Overlays on your videos right from the app!

The app also allows for larger file sizes and sits on your desktop for quick access that you can open anytime, anywhere. Click here to install the app and for a complete description of how to use the Overlay.TV YouTube Uploader.

For all you dev types check out Part One of Jesse from Nitobi's blog post on how the YouTube Uploader came to be at our newly launched Labs site.

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