Complete Control: KnowledgeVision Redefines Online Presentation Video

Lowering the Cost of Production

Obviously, from an end user's perspective, KnowledgeVision's mission is to enrich the viewing experience with navigation, interactivity, and immediate access to the most desired elements of a single presentation or even a collection of presentations (like an entire conference or conference track, up to and including navigating not just to individual seminars, but "chapters" of seminars identified by topic, and even individual questions in a Q& A session at the end of a seminar).

But another primary goal of KnowledgeVision, Kolowich says -- in terms of what the platform can do for the company's corporate clients, or what it enables corporate producers who use it to do for their clients -- is "lowering the cost of production per unit of usable output." And that is a key part of the KnowledgeVision value proposition, whether you're buying it or selling KnowledgeVision production as a service.

"Often," Kolowich says, "this means repurposing content that the clients already have but haven't yet made useful outside its original context." He points to a project KnowledgeVision produced for Mass Technology Leadership Council, in which they created a KnowledgeVision package for an entire conference track consisting of 8 sessions.

"Let's say I want to see what the constant contact guy says. Or maybe I went to this presentation, and remembered that he talked about 3 steps in their new sales process. So I'll go right to that part. I have now just taken a full day of material and gone exactly to the spot I wanted just by saying, ‘It's that presentation and that particular section.' This is taking material from a big conference and repurposing it."

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council packaged a full track of seminars in a single KnowledgeVision collection

Kolowich paraphrases the comments of Ed Youngblood, director of multimedia and digital marketing for KnowledgeVision client Alcatel Lucent: "People often ask me about the ROI from these video assets that I use. In a lot of cases, what I'm actually doing is increasing the ROI on the events and the presentations that are produced elsewhere in the organization. If I can take a customer conference that might have 100 customers, and I can take that material and make it available to 1,000 customers on demand, that's increased the ROI of the time and effort that went into the content of that conference."

KVStudio

From a content creator/corporate video producer's perspective, KnowledgeVision is essentially a template-based GUI that makes it surprisingly easy to assemble the building blocks of a presentation (video/audio, plus cued/synced PowerPoint slides, chapter points, footnotes) in a near-real-time process.

For professionals, this means licensing KVStudio (now in v. 4.0), a software application that installs on Windows and Macs and using its built-in tools and KnowledgeVision templates to assemble presentations on the KnowledgeVision playback platform, and partnering with KnowledgeVision on the delivery end. KVStudio is sold as a subscription-based service at prices starting at $195 monthly or $1,900 per year for the Basic Edition, or $495 per month and $5,000 per year for the Professional Edition (non-profit and educational discounts are also available). Pricing varies based on the number of production accounts and the use of additional features such as KVCollections (for combining multiple linked presentations from, say, a conference track into a single package), KVLive (the webcast version of KVStudio), and video streaming services supplied by KnowledgeVision. Video transcripts are built using the 3playmedia third-party transcription engine.

KnowledgeVision has also initiated a program called KVStudio for Producers that's designed specifically to help independent producers who do conference and corporate video and want to add the KnowledgeVision platform to their offerings for their clients. Kolowich says that one of the company's focal points between now and Streaming Media East (where KnowledgeVision will be exhibiting) will be to develop this program further. Currently, Kolowich says, roughly one-quarter of KnowledgeVision's clients are independent producers producing presentation videos for other companies.

While the KnowledgeVision player is mostly designed to work on Windows and Mac, Kolowich says it also delivers its full functionality on the Android platform and most of its functions on iOS devices, though limitations imposed by HTML5 reduces some of the interactivity and functionality on the iPad. But the player automatically recognizes the platform being used and adjusts accordingly.

All in all, Kolowich says, "you can see why what we've discovered is that we've created a new medium. Not a whole lot of people know how to use this new medium yet. They're starting to get into it. But as with any new medium, we're starting to get surprised by what our clients are coming up with."

Watch the demo below as a KnowledgeVision presentation with zoomable windows and a navigable transcript.