TubeMogul Promises Detailed Video Analytics in Minutes

If you're serving videos on your site, you need detailed analytics about who's watching them and how those visitors are finding you. Offering a solution is video distribution and ad company TubeMogul with InPlay, which is now free for all users. TubeMogul refers to InPlay as "Google Analytics for video."

InPlay is self-service, and integrates with most sites. The company says it can be installed into any video player in minutes or run as a plug-in. Compatible platforms include Adobe's Open Source Media Framework, LongTail Video's JW Player, Kaltura, and FlowPlayer. The service comes pre-installed with Brightcove.

A future roll-out will make the service work with HTML5, Microsoft Silverlight, and YouTube's embedded player. You can find the full list of supported platforms here.

To use the service, you'll need to set up a free TubeMogul account, activate it, and choose the video player or platform you use from a given list. The company offers tutorials for adding InPlay tracking.

Once you're set up, you'll get information on the time spent watching your videos, the locations of the viewers, the number of embedded players, referring sites and terms, and completion rates. You can track videos you've uploaded onto popular video sharing sites (such as YouTube and DailyMotion), and get detailed information for videos on your own site.

TubeMogul began offering InPlay in late 2008, when it purchased Illuminex, a video metrics start-up.

"One of the biggest pain-points that we hear about from our community is the absence of reliable and affordable video analytics tools in the marketplace," said Dave Otten, CEO of LongTail Video, the creators of the JW Player. "TubeMogul's InPlay plug-in helps solve that problem, which is why we are excited to make it available to anyone using the JW Player."

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net