Streaming Media's Success Story

Streaming Media Opportunities for Business
Streaming media is an effective tool for many uses in business, including advertising campaigns, marketing and branding, sales, training, and customer support. Below you’ll find some examples of uses VitalStream helped enable for its customers. The examples listed provide a small sampling of the success that can be achieved by effectively using rich streaming media in your overall business strategy. You will likely have your own ideas based on the unique needs of your business.

Advertising Campaigns/Marketing and Branding Effectiveness
Rich media advertising has become a market-leading approach to acquiring new customers online, and one that pays measurable dividends. If you’re advertising online, you can’t afford to ignore rich media’s benefits.

With branding and new customer acquisition as key objectives, VitalStream worked with a leading advertising agency to launch a year-long branding campaign for a large global consumer product company. The launch was delivered using the Flash Video Streaming Service powered by VitalStream. As part of the campaign, interactive Flash video ads were featured on the homepages of Yahoo, MSN, and other high-traffic internet portals. VitalStream’s experience with large scale streaming projects, internal software infrastructure, and content delivery networks helped to make the launch a success.

Results speak for themselves, and the data shows that rich media advertising works. DoubleClick—the leading provider of solutions for advertising agencies, marketers, and Web publishers to plan, execute, and analyze their online marketing programs—reported that in Q1 2004, click-through rates for rich media web site ads are four times those of traditional static-image (.gif, .jpg) ads. The data also shows that rich media delivers. Conversion rates for rich media ads are 2.30%, fully half-again the 1.47% conversion rate for static ads.

Product Demos and Training Effectiveness
Q1 2004 DoubleClick SiteAdvance Web analytics data shows that consumers are becoming more sophisticated in their online shopping behavior. They are spending more time on web sites, looking at more pages, using search functions more frequently, and are more likely to use their shopping cart as a comparison shopping tool.

Streaming media enhances the online experience for your customers by appealing to multiple senses, improving the ability for customers to understand and retain your message. Adding interactivity to online product and sales demonstrations keeps the customer interested, which translates into converted sales and closed business.

A leading CRM company approached VitalStream to deliver a Flash video streaming-based "demo center" to be placed on their corporate web site. The interactive demo center features an interface where customers can select a demonstration based on their intended uses of the product. Video of company experts is streamed and synchronized with interactive slides reinforcing message points made by the speaker.

One of the largest online auction sites worked with VitalStream to create an online university educating its customers on how to buy and sell goods using its service. The multimedia curriculum features interactive slides and high quality video of their "Dean of Education" teaching five separate course modules. The educational content is sold on a pay-per-view subscription basis using a payment processing solution capable of handling thousands of transactions per second and taking international orders. Streaming the content helps increase the reach by providing the course via the Internet. Students receive the same content as they would at the in-person seminars, and even get a diploma when they have successfully completed the coursework and tests.