Complete Control: KnowledgeVision Redefines Online Presentation Video

In the world of web video production, many of us take for granted that we're serving short attention spans. We've all read the stats, which typically tell us that 20% of web viewers move on within 10 seconds if they don't like what they see. But is this evidence of short attention spans, or simply resistance to spending time with content that doesn't immediately meet a viewer's specific expectations? Web viewers are, by and large, the ultimate non-captive audience; they can always look elsewhere for the viewing experience they desire, and expect to have full control over it when they get there.

Given those expectations that are inherent to the online video experience, conference and presentation video on the web would seem to be a poor match. The experience of being enveloped and engaged by a dynamic live presentation is difficult to replicate online, and the experience of being trapped by and forced to endure a relatively dull one is something web viewers rarely have to worry about.

The challenge of making conference, meeting, educational, training, and sales presentations compelling--and monetizable--online is one faced by thousands of companies these days. Whether you're charged with producing video in-house at one of these organizations or hired to do it as an independent producer, how do you create watchable and effective videos in a milieu where content is king, and must be delivered in toto?

Sometimes, all a king needs is a court. In the case of video presentations on the web, one solution is to incorporate elements that support and augment the content and create an enveloping experience that replaces the live presentation experience, rather than replicating it. When web video's most valued currency--brevity--isn't an option, you need to present your long-form presentation video in a way that puts your viewers in control, and gives them one or several ways to pick and choose exactly the video segments they want to see, and advance to them immediately, without sacrificing familiar aspects of a live presentation like clear and visible PowerPoint slides and other graphics that don't always translate well from a live presentation environment to online video.

Your first task is to deliver the PowerPoint and other graphical elements in their original form, rather than as a blurry and distant component of the typical single-camera, back-of-the-room conference video. And most folks who produce conference, meeting, or other presentation videos professionally have mastered to some degree the separation--and hopefully the syncing--of video and graphics. But taking that first evolutionary step, however necessary, doesn't guarantee a satisfying web-viewing experience, or one that will really meet your clients' or your companies' needs when it comes to transmuting a live presentation into something that's popular and profitable on the web.

Enter KnowledgeVision

Michael Kolowich has encountered all of the challenges associated with translating presentations into effective web video on innumerable corporate projects he's taken on in his prominent Massachusetts-based video company, DigiNovations. Increasingly, he discovered that the way to make these presentations work online was not to shorten them, but to create a more immersive experience that leveraged the strengths of the web as a means of conveying video, audio, graphics, and other types of information rather than simply trying to make it seem a little more like being there.

DigiNovations and KnowledgeVision founder Michael Kolowich

And it was from these efforts to develop a better way of delivering presentations online that he began developing KnowledgeVision, a flexible online presentation platform that combines video, PowerPoint, a rolling (and searchable) transcript function, chapter-based navigation, footnotes, downloadable attachments, and more in a multi-window, user- and developer-customizable online experience. And though it grew from one video company's attempts to solve its clients' problems, it's now available for licensing to corporate video producers and content creators to meet their own companies', or their own clients' online presentation needs.

A KnowledgeVision presentation developed for Alcatel-Lucent with video, PowerPoint, transcript, attachments, chapters, and user-zoomable windows