Time after time, the answer comes back as something that is frighteningly tiny.  And I know that much of the work that goes into acquiring and tuning a spectacular high-definition image is going to be lost in some web designer’s idea of how big (or small) video should be on a page.

Take, for example, this image grabbed (at actual size) from the Goldman Sachs website:

Yes, that’s our Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in his old job at Goldman.  But the point here is that the video window in this huge player — which takes up a whole page to present navigation widgets to get to other videos, plus a transcript of what he’s saying — is so small (204 pixels wide by 108 high, to be precise) that it requires the viewer to squint in order to take it in.  This may be (barely) OK for talking heads, but when it comes to actually showing us things in video, the miniscule image is useless.

I’m not sure what it is that drives web designers to make video tiny.  It may be that until a few years ago, larger video sized looked awful on web pages.  Primitive encoders made the video look chunky.  Low bandwidth made it jerky.  And the lack of a player standard made it impossible to make video work consistently on all platforms.

But we’re by all that now.  The Flash VP6 and H.264 codecs produce gorgeous web video — at least when a knowledgeable producer is at the controls.  We can pretty much count on there being 500 kilobits per second of bandwidth available to our viewers.  And the ubiquity of Flash on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers (but sadly not on iPhones — wake up, Steve Jobs!) means that we don’t have to confuse viewers with a dizzying choice of “Windows Media, QuickTime, or RealMedia”).

Over time, we’ve become very happy with web video encoded at a size of 480 pixels wide by 270 pixels high (for widescreen productions) and 500 kbps bandwidths.  Here’s what it looks like with those specs, applied to a film we recently created for Boston College:

Video like this is experiential, and it’s designed to be viewed immersively.  (In fact, the premiere was on a huge high-definition screen.)  It’s bad enough that most people will listen to the soundtrack on a tiny laptop speaker; to ask them to squint at a postage-stamp image takes the rest of the experience away.

Bandwidth is increasing rapidly, and so are the expectations of web video viewers.  Encoding software is getting better, too, and high-definition web video experiences are already starting to arrive.

So the next time a web designer shows you a web video page design that relegates video to a small window, ask him or her why.  You may well find that they’re living with old assumptions that have been shattered by the quality of today’s web video experience.

And when looking at case studies, where better to start than the Mecca of case study teaching, Harvard Business School?

HBS commissioned us at DigiNovations to create a film that dove deep into what makes the Harvard approach to case method teaching truly unique and valuable, and the result was a film called “Inside the Case Method”.  Originally intended for prospective MBA students, interest in the film has spread far beyond its intended audience.  The web version of the video alone was viewed more than 50,000 times in its first year.

Step One: Traditional Web Player

When they first got the film, HBS’ first instinct was to embed it in a single player that played the film from beginning to end — all 13 minutes of it.  This was straightforward to implement, and we deployed the player on the Brightcove platform and gave HBS a few lines of embed code to put into their web page.  The result was this kind of look:

While this is a reasonably “vanilla” approach to staging video (especially such a long one), implementing the player in Brightcove offered several advantages:

• Since it’s implemented in Flash, as opposed to Windows Media, QuickTime, or RealMedia, it is automatically compatible with more computing platforms than any other option;
• The player sports several viral features, including “email this” and “get link” buttons to help people spread the word;
• The video was hosted outside HBS’ servers in a worldwide content distribution network, which meant that it could support many simultaneous users without taxing HBS’ servers or creating bandwidth bottlenecks that could ruin the viewer experience;
• HBS and DigiNovations had access to detailed viewing statistics; and
• Since the film was implemented on a content management system, it was easy to post revisions to the video without getting into expensive and time-consuming web programming.

Still, putting a monolithic, 13-minute video on the web is “oh-so-2005,” as my teenage daughter might say.  Part of the message of the video was in its structure, and we urged HBS to consider player design options that exposed the film’s structure and allowed the viewer to move around from part to part.

Step 2: A Multi-Chapter Interactive Player

To expose the structure a bit, we broke the film into its constituent parts — each of which represented a different phase of the case method process.  Then we built a multi-chapter interactive player that made each section of the film easily findable and recognizable, just by rolling over the lower part of the player.  The result is an experience that serves two kinds of viewers: the patient types, who might just want to view the film from beginning to end; and the impatient types, who might just want to go directly to an area of interest:

This player is implemented on the new PermissionTV 2.0 platform, and required some Flash/Flex programming by our resident genius, Alex Kieft.  Again, the PermissionTV platform enables us to implement viral features such as “mail this”, “link this”, and “embed this” buttons.  Now that we’ve implemented this format, though, it’s easy for us to take any multi-chapter film and present it in this player format.

Step 3: Full Integration into the Website Design

Recently, Harvard Business School launched a whole new website for its MBA program, and is featuring “Inside the Case Method” as a centerpiece of its presentation.  This illustrates beautifully what a client can do with a generous budget and a commitment to integrating video fully into its web design.

Click through to the MBA website, and then on the words “LEARNING MODEL” in the menu on the banner of the screen.  Now you’ll see a sequence of scenes, excerpted from the film we produced, dedicated to the learning and teaching model at HBS.

Is it necessary to go all the way to an integrated design in order to full engage visitors in video content?  I personally don’t think so; the multi-chapter player in Step 2 is a great solution for smaller budgets.  But when the big budget is there, integrated web design certainly creates an attractive, engaging, highly functional experience.

We have great admiration for what HBS has done with our video on their website, and believe that marketers can learn a great deal from the three different levels of sophistication they’ve pursued in presenting “inside the Case Method” to the public.

Thumbnail of image made from Sony XDCAM EX video frame (click to see original 1920 x 1080 image)But another revelation has come as we’ve started to pull still images out of our videos. Take a look at the image here to the right, taken directly from video shot during a recent Boston College-Clemson football game (click on it to get the full-resolution image), and you’ll see what I mean. 

Stills from video have traditionally been, to put it politely, pretty miserable. Think about it: the traditional standard-definition video image has 326,400 pixels in it (640 x 480). What’s more, since most standard-definition video is shot in an interlaced format, any moving picture can have as few as 170,000 usable pixels in it. Would you use a 0.2 to 0.4 megapixel still camera for anything useful? I didn’t think so. Enter the XDCAM format, with its ability to shoot full-resolution 1920 x 1080 images in progressive format, which means that there’s no interleaving of moving images. Now you’ve got a full 2 megapixels of image — 7 to 15 times as many pixels as the typical frame-grab from a standard-definition camera.

Do these images stand up to 8 to 12 megapixel still cameras? Yes, and no. Most images from today’s high-resolution still cameras represent overkill in all but poster-sized prints.  All those extra pixels are useful when it comes to severely cropping images, but most of the time they aren’t used.  A well-composed, 1920 x 1080 image is terrific for many applications.

It’s in shot selection that video cameras shine.  After all, a video camera is normally taking 30 still images per second, which is extraordinarily useful in selecting stills from action shots…and even to find just the right expression on a subject’s face.

That said, it’s important to realize that most video cameras are set, by default, to an effective “shutter speed” of 1/60, which is far too slow to capture action shots.  If you expect to capture stills from video action scenes, it takes some planning ahead: we’ve found that action scenes of outdoor sports can be shot at a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second to achieve great results.  And when you’ve got a choice, make sure you use a “progressive” (rather than “interleaved”) video format, which ensures that every bit of the frame is sampled at the same time, yielding a crisper image.

So we’re just getting to the point where more-than-acceptable still images can be made from new, modern high-definition video formats.  Still cameras will continue to rule for many applications because of their superior portability, use of flash supplemental lighting, and higher-resolution images.  But today’s cameras — particularly the brand new Red camera — are quickly closing the gap.

“…now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure fair access for all users.

I’ve been doing the math for a couple of years, and it’s been clear to me that the excess internet capacity built during the dot-com bubble — once throught to be enough to last another decade or more — is quickly disappearing.  Soon the internet infrastructure companies will need to start building capacity once again, and that means what was once “free” bandwidth at the margin will start costing real dollars.  And that will create an enormous temptation for ISP’s to start charging at the margin for “excess” bandwidth.

The charges aren’t likely to be much, in the great scheme of things.  One plan is to charge about $1 per gigabyte (content providers already pay, typically, about half that amount to put their material out on the web).  The size of a minute of video can vary widely, but across all our clients our average is 4.25 megabytes per minute — or about four hours of video per gigabyte.  (Note that high-definition video can drive this down considerably.)

But in my experience, even small charges can start causing changes in viewer behavior and attitude versus flat-fee, “all you can eat” pricing.  All of a sudden, a web page that loads up lots of graphics and — gulp — video may be resented.  Elaborate Flash ads will be met with icy “you’re making me pay for this?” responses from price-sensitive users.

This is certainly a development worth watching, and we as video producers will need to be sensitive to changes in user behavior as time goes on.  In the end, though, the key is to keep producing high-quality, relevant content that is wanted or needed by the viewers…and to stay away from producing the frivolus, low-quality content that now wastes viewer time and soon will be wasting their money.

Senator Edward Kennedy, from a Bill Charette production for the Museum of Science in BostonThat’s why it’s such a pleasure to see a professional like Bill Charette at work.  Bill, who is Director of Photography at DigiNovations, gave a talk last night at the National Professional Videographers Association of New England, and focused on the lost art of interview lighting.  Interviews are at the heart of video storytelling…and making interview subjects look and sound their best is essential to getting the story told well and memorably.

Here is a gallery of still frame images showing Bill Charette’s lighting artistry, pulled from some of DigiNovations’ recent productions.

Still frame from a production for Syracuse University Law SchoolI’ll save some of the specific techniques for a later post, but suffice to say that when I work with Bill Charette, I know I’m in the presence of a professional who’s deeply dedicated to every detail of his craft.  Many videographers look at the interview as a necessary evil and focus their energy on the “eye candy” and “money shots”.  Bill understands that great video starts with the basic interview — and taking the time to light and compose a film’s storytellers properly can make all the difference in the world.

Denise’s interview with me is published as a podcast on her website, and goes into far more detail than any of my blog posts about why and how we created the internet TV channel for the Mitt Romney for President campaign.  Mitt TV is widely knowledged as the first comprehensive video channel for a presidential campaign.

Both the Romney and Obama campaigns understood the power of video not only to get the message out but also to attract, engage, and actuate supporters on the main campaign website.  Without disclosing specific numbers, we found that when we could use web video to bring a viewer to the campaign website and call them to action, the payoff — in terms of contributions, volunteer sign-ups, referrals, event attendance, etc. — was orders of magnitude more than the cost of serving up the video.  That’s why we favored video on our own website over the many clips we posted on YouTube.  And that’s why by the end of the Romney campaign we had more than 400 video clips online and literally thousands of in-links to Mitt TV.

The campaigns have been waking up to this potential slowly, and some of them have been tuning in even more slowly to the modern tools of internet TV channel design and implementation.  By the 2012 campaign cycle, this will all seem like old hat…but for now, the candidates are definitely on different tracks and most certainly achieving different results.  It may be pure coincidence that the candidates’ fundraising performance correlates with their sophistication on internet video, but our experience suggests that sophisticated use of web video certainly has an impact on keeping an active, vibrant base of supporters who visit often and want to stay involved.

More than 139 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 206 minutes per person viewing online video in January.

…

More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.

Also, according to the comScore study:

• The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes; and
• The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.

These numbers are stunning even for an internet video content booster like me.  It suggests that internet video has penetrated far beyond the teen and twentysomething crowd.  And it suggests that, with broadband adoption becoming near-universal at home and work and more than three-quarters of internet users not only ABLE to watch video online but actually WATCHING it, we’ve now reached the point where internet video is not only attractive as part of any website design, but it will soon be expected.

Our friends over at Discmakers, the folks who make the DVD duplicating equipment we use at DigiNovations, have put out a valuable tip sheet containing a lot of the things you’ll want to think about as you’re preparing to bring your project to a creative shop like ours to turn into an engaging, spectacular DVD.  As they point out:

From the time your independent film is in the can, your post-production efforts are likely to include thoughts of DVD, whether your output is a feature film, documentary, training course, marketing infomercial, or animated short. Though you may have mastered the intricacies and challenges of set lighting, lenses, audio capture, and non-linear editing, getting your work onto DVD requires attention to some technical considerations that may be unfamiliar to you.

So if your project is destined for DVD — and especially if you want a creatively-authored DVD that looks like a Hollywood hit — then click on “From DV to DVD: Tips for Getting Outstanding Results”.  And feel free to ask us about any questions you might have.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

The article notes, correctly, that the technology to compress and optimize flow of information around the net — effectively increasing the capacity of the internet infrastructure — is improving very rapidly as well.  And even if capacity comes under strain, the effects are likely to be felt as “brown-outs” rather than blackouts — that is, slow-downs due to congestion, concentrated in certain regions and dayparts.

Nonetheless, it is a reminder once again that we are at this time beneficiaries of a perfect storm of benefits: the need to fill over-built bandwidth from the internet boom keeps access prices down, and the land-grab for customers and eyeballs by video content services is keeping video hosting costs down (or even free).  Those factors will disappear over the next few years, and we’ll start to see the true economic cost of bandwidth and hosting reflected in the pricing.

Those of us with a long-range view for our content initiatives need to keep the long-term economics in mind, even as we’re enjoying the short-term benefits of a pricing boon.

The service has been in beta test for months, and invitations have been difficult to come by.  But now, anyone can check in and sign up.  And just about every major NBC and Fox network program is there — not just the current program, but also the archives!  The only content you’ll find here is professionally-produced content.  No home-baked Mentos-and-Diet-Coke hacks, and no LonelyGirl laments.  This is the first and best real test of an advertising-financed aggregation service built totally around professional content.

Here are some early impressions:

• Once again, this is an affirmation of how great Flash Video is in providing a wonderful viewing experience.  I’ve written before here that for purposes of our work, the video format wars are over (though I realize that Microsoft is trying to say “not so fast” with its budding Silverlight offering).  But for now, Flash Video gives us content producers a wonderful, high-quality viewing experience on a computer.  When encoded from the original live material, the quality is quite stunning (compare this version of the Saturday Night Live Clinton-Obama 3am phone call sketch to what you might see posted on YouTube, for example):

• As I’ve just illustrated, the power of freely allowing video to be embedded in other sites is a dramatic multiplier on distribution.
• HD video on the web is definitely coming along, as you can see from the movie trailer clip below which is encoded int HD at 1280x720 pixels — essentially the same as a 720p high-definition television set.  And the quality is stunning when played full-screen on my 1440x920 laptop display, with no visible scale-up artifacts.  However, the bandwidth demands are very high — at least 2.5 megabits per second.  I get that on my brand-new Verizon FIOS connection at home, but I’d never try it in the office, where our T1 line delivers half that speed on a good day.  (If you’ve got the bandwidth, check it out at http://www.hulu.com/hd/12589, but make sure you ask it to play full-screen.)
• I’m noting, too, that Fox has not quite gone all-in on its content.  Shows like “24”, that derive a lot of revenue from DVD sales, have only partial libraries available for free on the web.  (Seasons 1 and 6 of “24” are available, while Seasons 2 through 5 are only available on DVD.)
• Still, the budding network — even in test — is illustrating Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” theory.  Even in its limited test period with tens of thousands of clips and programs online, 80% of the content was viewed at least once per week, according to the folks at Hulu.
• Finally, a portability option is going to be essential.  I’ve gotten hooked on video programming — particularly video podcasts, including news programming like “Meet the Press” and “NBC Nightly News”, and groundbreaking series like the TED Talks.  But rarely do I want to watch them on my internet-connected computer — I carry them with me on airplanes, in the car, and in doctors’ waiting rooms.  But until someone comes up with the essential feedback loop to be able to report on who’s watched which ads in an ad-supported network, the portability barrier will be a difficult one for content-owners to leap.

All in all, a promising first release.  And some healthy competition for Apple iTunes, who once threatened to put a stranglehold on the market.

Download the PDF file (Requires Adobe Reader)

And the ability to embed this video directly into the Web Video Expert blog illustrates another important point: the way in which video can now move out of its original context into entirely new settings, just by clicking on a “Get Code” button and pasting the HTML code into the right place on your web page.  This, of course, can cuts both way because the farther it gets from the source, the farther it gets from benefitting the rest of your site if you intend your video content to be a magnet to attract site visitors.  But for those with a message to spread, it’s great news, as you can find many more “front doors” to your content than you ever imagined.

But an article this morning in the online newsletter Xconomy by Wade Rousch (click for “The Greater Boston Internet Video Cluster”) really brought it home by attempting to list all the companies providing platforms, tools, and enabling technologies in this space.  In Rousch’s words:

Boston may take a back seat to Los Angeles and New York as a locus for TV, film, and video production, but it’s front and center when it comes to the array of technologies that go into publishing and monetizing video content on the Internet.

…

Now an increasing fraction of traditional TV and movie content—along with a huge tidal wave of brand-new content, much of it generated by consumers themselves—is available over the Internet.

…

It turns out that a lot of the companies building this technology are right here in Boston.

Because it’s so central to the future of media, this is an industry cluster that deserves to be spotlighted.

Rousch’s list — which he openly admits is a work in progress — identifies 28 Boston-area companies involved in the internet TV space, and I can think of a half-dozen more whose business plans and prototypes I’ve seen but are still operating in “stealth mode”.

This is exciting news for both us as content producers and for our clients, as there will be lots of opportunities to try new technologies to engage, inform, and activate viewers and customers.  And once again it’s great to see Boston re-establishing itself as a hub in a very important new domain.

People generally remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 50% of what they hear and see.

There are literally hundreds of variations on this quote on the web today, and it’s actually quite amusing to go through some of them, such as this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.  And often there are research footnotes to back it up.

So of course, when I wanted to use these statistics in putting together compelling (but accurate) materials on why companies and organizations should enhance their websites with video, I wanted to use as accurate a quotation as possible.  So I started trying to trace the quote back to its original source, and found that it was like trying to hold mercury in my hand.  Every time it appeared I was getting close to the original research, it would slip through my fingers and I’d find myself at a dead end — or worse, an infinite loop.

Now, thanks to a recent analysis I discovered by learning-and-performance consultant Will Thalheimer Ph.D., I know why: the original research doesn’t exist and the statistical conclusions were made up and perpetuated along the way.  Here is an excerpt from his excellent online article, “People Remember 10%, 20%…Oh Really?” (followed by more in his follow-up “One More Time”):

People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar pronouncements are fraudulent. Moreover, general statements on the effectiveness of learning methods are not credible—-learning results depend on too many variables to enable such precision. Unfortunately, this bogus information has been floating around our field for decades, crafted by many different authors and presented in many different configurations, including bastardizations of Dale’s Cone.

…

The percentages, and the graph in particular, have been passed around in our field from reputable person to reputable person. The people who originally created the fabrications are to blame for getting this started, but there are clearly many people willing to bend the information to their own devices. Kinnamon’s (2002) investigation found that Treichler’s percentages have been modified in many ways, depending on the message the shyster wants to send. Some people have changed the relative percentages. Some have improved Treichler’s grammar. Some have added categories to make their point. For example, one version of these numbers says that people remember 95% of the information they teach to others.

All of which reminds me of the old line: “82.6 percent of all statistics used to prove a point (including this one) are made up on the spot.”

In rejecting the bogus statistics, however, it’s important not to discard the larger point.  There’s no doubt in my mind that a well-produced film or video program conveys experiences and impressions in a way that is much easier to retain and internalize than, in many cases, the written word.  Film and video is all about experience and emotion and hearing things in people’s own words.  Human beings are simply “wired” to retain experiences that touch so many senses and emotions.  In other words, people respond to good storytelling.

You might not be able to measure it with statistics, but every day we see viewers of our films moved to action and we hear from viewers who remember tiny details that touched off some emotion or memory.

The power of visual storytelling is indisputable.  We just may not be able to put numbers on it all the time.

A great example of this is what Transamerica Retirement Management has recently started doing with their SecurePath by Transamerica website.  A major feature of the website is a series of video programs that address issues and concerns for baby boomers in transition to the later stages of their life.  Here’s what they say about the series on the site:

Sometimes, the journey is just as interesting and exciting as the destination. That’s exactly what you’ll find reflected in clips from our Video Library — stories about Boomers and their experiences transitioning into retirement. We’ll bring you a different subject in the series each and every month. Last month, we explored issues related to staying healthy. This month, we examine different housing options. Please visit the library often and enjoy upcoming subjects on budgeting, travel, and more!

The content Transamerica started out with was repurposed from a public television series called “Boomers: Redefining Life After Fifty,” which was broadcast in 2006.  Transamerica selected more than thirty two- to three-minute segments from the TV series, licensed the content from the show producers, recorded custom introductions and closes, and put the series out one month at a time, inviting viewers to come back again and again to the SecurePath website to view new segments.  (The team at DigiNovations helped get Transamerica set up with their video on the web, and we manage their Brightcove web video channel on their behalf.)

Satisfied with that first experiment, the company has recently commissioned entirely new video content to put on the site, such as this interview segment on creativity in retirement years with Dr. Gene Cohen.

The idea of using fresh content to bring customers and prospects back again and again to a website is a familiar one.  The innovation here is using video content as the draw, and hosting it on a content management system that makes it easy to manage and present the clips in a high-quality format that’s viewable across a wide variety of computers and web browsers.

It’s an idea whose time has come, and Transamerica has broken out as a leader of this particular pack.