More good news about online video, and an interesting challange for e-Clips

Last week I met with Gadi Mayer. A successful entrepreneur, sold a few companies, the most recent was Fraud Sciences to Ebay (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/ebay-acquires-fraud-sciences-for-169-million/). I has some questions about possibilities for the business and different visions I had. Most interestingly, the word “scalability” cam up again and again. “You could have a prosperous business”, said Gadi, “but if you really want a big company, think how you could make 10,000 videos a day”.
A challenge indeed, and the view to such an incredible company is blocked by a technological hurdle: video production now-days is dependant on an actual video camera, handled by an actual person (hopefully a professional), directed by a real person, and edited by another one. How do you create automization of the process? How do you scale video productions to the capability to create 10,000 videos a day? Need to invest a lot of thought into that, and will probably need another domain name, something shorter than http://www.eclipsvideos.com/. How about "Youtube"? Naaah. Stupid name.

Well, no answers yet. But questions are fun as well. Meantime, Gadi sent me this Wall Street Journal article, discussing online video ads production and claiming that: “Click- h rates for video ads are higher than they are for plain-image or text-only ads, statistics from Google's digital-marketing firm DoubleClick show.” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121803438950516993.html).
Online video ads are gathering more and more speed, and it’s fun to watch, and even more exciting to participate.

Exciting future for online video

An encounter with a wonderful new start-up (can't reveal the name just yet) made me realize that e-Clips does much more than create video invitations. It does much more than create promotional videos for websites. e-Clips provides video marketing solutions. Still working on promotional videos, and video invitations, but with a much broader scope. And the need for video marketing solutions will continue rising, of that I am sure.

Many companies, including Google, are working on speech recognition systems for videos. And 3 weeks ago, Google announced the start of "voice to text" implementation on Youtube political videos (read about it here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-their-own-words-political-videos.html).
That means that we are moving into a new marketing era – an era in which video will be as important as text, if not more (well I do think that video “sells” better than text and pictures. It also means that we will start seeing video SEO services (Search Engine Optimization – basically improving a website’s rank on search engines). Hopefully e-Clips will be ahead of the curve regarding online video – we’ll continue creating promotional and marketing videos, video invitations for events, and who knows what else. And one final thing – the new website is up and running: www.eclipsvideos.com. As we say in the Hebrew land - Mazal Tov.