Wall Street Journal reporter Geoffrey Fowler recently wrote about a growing trend among e-commerce sites to include video and rich media in the online shopping experience. This is a trend we have noticed across our customer base over the past couple years, especially among on high-volume e-retail sites like Gaiam and Ticketmaster. In fact, research firm Knowledge Marketing says that more than 40 percent of online retailers in the US plan to add video to their site in the coming year. comScore also reported that the number of US shoppers who watched retail videos has increased by more than 40 percent over the year earlier.
The Wall Street Journal article features Brightcove customer Simon & Schuster and their use of online video. Here's an excerpt:
"Simon & Schuster Inc. decided to invest heavily in video when it relaunched its Web site in January. The book publisher, a division of CBS Corp., built a video studio and generated hundreds of author profiles to play on the site and on the sites of its retail partners.
But hosting streaming video can be complicated and expensive. So Ellie Hirschhorn, Simon & Schuster's chief digital officer, shifted the company's video into a system sold by Brightcove Inc. Brightcove sells a package of software and service that does everything from encoding video to streaming it to viewers' computers.
Ms. Hirschhorn says she uses Brightcove to place high-definition video -- along with audio-only interviews and still images -- in templates that show up like a jukebox on Web surfers' screens. These offerings can be "grabbed," or embedded in other sites, allowing affiliate marketing sites or fans of particular authors to build Simon & Schuster's video into their own pages. Last summer, a series of videos for a new collection of Stephen King short stories were played more than a million and a half times across a variety of sites, says Ms. Hirschhorn."
Click here for the full article and you can see an example of one of their promotional videos below.