Video E-Mail And The In-box
What’s Really New?
After several disappointing video mail experiences in the past five or six years, I had all but given up on the concept. In February 2003, I was offered an opportunity to use a new video mail system for business to business communications. The results are no less than phenomenal. I have a 95% open rate. I figure the remaining 5 % are people who don’t check their e-mail regularly. Out of 110 recipients to date, only three have had problems viewing the video mail (considerably higher rate of success than the 30 to 35% success rate predicted by a recent Jupiter study on video mail). In about one third of the 240 unique messages sent, video mails inspire a reply that is faster than normal and with higher positive responses. No less than 15 of the people who have received video mail from me expressed astonishment by the quality of the experience. As a consultant who specializes in the use of video in business communications, my target audience is a biased sample of people who are using high performance PCs, have high throughput and persistent connections to the Internet and are already sensitive to the merits of video.
In addition to having a predisposed audience, I attribute the highly successful experience I have had to two key breakthroughs offered in the current generation of video mail technology (as exemplified by Avalon Digital Marketing’s Messenger DVX, but there is at least one competitor in this category) that make it easy to use, easy to receive and offer a mechanism for tracking the results.
First, integration with the existing asynchronous communications application significantly lowers the friction associated with creating video mail. Compared with the tools bundled with webcams in the past or free on the Internet, the video mail capture interface I am using is a Java-based application within a browser or a communications plug-in within Outlook. There is no longer any need to install (and subsequently use) a separate software application to create video mail and, when using an Outlook plug in creating video mail, I leverage my existing contacts database. I open the video capture control window with the click of one button within the standard e-mail interface.
The second breakthrough that could significantly change the video mail and video marketing landscapes is in the architecture of the message delivery system. In the past and in some current solutions, a video mail is sent as an attachment. If the attachment is a self-playing executable, many enterprise security systems will remove it before the intended recipient ever sees it. If it is an ".avi" file, it can be large and exceed corporate e-mail size limitations. If it gets through, it requires a separate application to play back.
Video mail should be streamed whenever possible. Once my original file is uploaded to a server, the server encodes the content into files that are ready and waiting for delivery. Then the server issues my HTML e-mail containing a small embedded Java application. The video mail stays in the network and is only streamed to the recipient’s client when the e-mail is opened. Besides avoiding the pitfalls of sending large or executable attachments and potentially offering content delivery network providers a new revenue stream, this architecture has other significant advantages. One advantage is that when the video is requested, the server can detect the bandwidth available and stream the appropriate bit rate, selected on a case by case basis. Another is that the server logs the day and time each individual file is accessed. This is especially valuable for use in e-marketing campaigns which are measured by impressions per messages sent.
This last point is what really distinguishes the video mail and digital video marketing systems with viable business models from half hearted proofs of concept. A digital video or rich media marketing system should always include a robust platform that offers the campaign sender statistics by which to measure the return on investment.
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