No matter your business focus—public service, B2B integration, recruitment—multimedia, in particular video, is remarkably effective in communicating with the audience. Before, making video accessible to diverse viewers involved tasks galore, such as eliciting the service of production studios to manually dub, transcribe, and add subtitles. Those operations were costly and slow, especially for globally destined content.
While facing the pandemic-induced setbacks to its live-events business in the past two years, our customer and event innovator Bizzabo decided to reshape its offering into a digital-first Event Experience OS that fosters human connections and generates excitement. Toward that end, Bizzabo turned to Cloudinary for support of high-performance, visual events for large audiences to replace or augment live shows.
In November 2021, Cloudinary teamed up with Dolby.io to participate in their Build the World With Dolby.io Hackathon aimed at sparking spectacular and innovative hybrid audio- and video-conference experiences. Invited were developers and creators from around the world to compete for a prize pool valued at over $25,000. Not only did the hackathon grant those professionals the opportunity to supercharge their projects' media assets with Cloudinary’s unique features, but it also enabled them to join a series of talks given by Cloudinary's resident media experts: Tessa Mero, Becky Peltz, Paige Drake, and Scott Wachtmann.
“Holistic accessibility … provide[s] people with disabilities the best chance to achieve equality.” — Sheri Byrne-Haber
As digital technology advances, video is gaining popularity across industries, replete with entertaining, engaging, and coherent content. All too often, however, not everyone can access it for various reasons.
Now that telecommuting for work will likely continue to be the norm, people are communicating more and more by audio and video. In fact, many professional creators are now running projects from their home setup.
A brick-and-mortar store’s ability to connect with shoppers is a main draw of shopping in person. On the other hand, e-commerce requires an understanding that online shopping differs from physical retailing, calling for proactive steps that mimic in-person experience as much as possible through sight and sound. Since the in-store experience extends beyond merchandise to ambiance, decor, and lighting, let alone the presence of sales associates, it makes sense that retailers are leveraging imagery, video, and other graphical elements to make shopping online similar to buying in store.
To effectively engage with today’s digital audience, websites must be extremely visual. Even though high-quality images and videos play a key role in attracting and retaining visitors, those media assets also add to the page weight, load time, and bandwidth. Unoptimized content can result in performance issues, causing visitors to bounce off.
User-generated content (UGC) took off with, first of all, the advent of the internet and, subsequently, social networks. Everyday consumers were given keys to the kingdom, so to speak, so that they, too, could compose and post content, simultaneously engaging with others online. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok—the networks through which we can create and publish content have grown exponentially, and brands are becoming aware of the benefits of tapping into the gold mines offered by those networks.
Social commerce combines the persuasive power of social media and e-commerce to deliver immersive shopping experiences. Recent research predicts that, by 2028, the global market size for social commerce will have grown by 28.4% to US$3,370 billion, with China being the current forerunner.
To capture audience attention, content creators produce videos with compelling imagery to tell engaging stories. However, many miss one of the most important aspects of video: audio. Not only does riveting audio immerse viewers in the experience, it also enhances visuals with sound effects, commentary, mood music, and such. Inferior audio quickly ruins the ambiance.