Buto.tv Debuts Clickable Hotspots

Birmingham, UK-based Buto.tv has been quietly making a name for itself with its £99 (approxi. $150) per month online video platform, but the e-commerce feature it's starting today should get it a lot more attention. Customers can now create clickable hotspots in their videos, allowing viewers to easily buy products they see, or share them or add them to a wish list.

Buto.tv is a software-as-a-service online video platform that targets people and companies selling products online. This new feature is sure to popular with that audience, as it turns video into even more of a sales tool. In a video of a runway fashion show, for example, viewers could simply click the objects they like and want to see more of later.

The clickable hotspot feature is open to all Buto.tv customers for no additional cost. Customers can integrate it with their own check-out systems to enable purchasing.

To use the hotspot feature, customers create a hotspot when an item first enters their video, and another when it leaves the video. If the object moves around much, they can set other hotspots at key areas. The software then creates a clickable area that follows the object, resizing when necessary.

Buto.tv is worth knowing about for its search engine optimization features, as well. It can automatically create a video sitemap for customer sites every day and submit them to search engines. Video sitemaps are excellent ways to increase search engine traffic.

The £99 price gets customers up to 75GB of bandwidth per month. There's no limit on storage (within reason, the company says). The company can detect HTML5 iOS devices and will stream compliant video to them.

"What we tried to do is take you out of the IT department and put you into marketing. We tried to put the tools in peoples' hands to let them use clickable video. The concept has been around for years, but it's never been usable before. That's what we've done is make it usable," says Will Grant, Buto.tv's technical director.