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.
Although bringing products to life with high-quality video started as a nice-to-have feature, video has become a key part of e-commerce. Consumers expect to see product videos before making purchasing decisions, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented them from browsing products in person, significantly expanding the e-commerce market.
Slideshows. Though sometimes boring, they are an essential cog in the corporate wheel, having served for decades as the medium for presentations. For a more lively display, consider combining various media types into a single video slideshow, which could serve as compelling, personalized, and engaging content for your users. Additionally, you can apply sophisticated transition configurations and Cloudinary’s many transformation capabilities.
Attracting visitors to engage with your product videos is an excellent way to boost clickthrough rates, and ultimately, sales. The question is, how do you generate that engagement? Playlists and clickable links come to mind, but generally they appear only after a video has finished playing. For a more captivating user experience, add relevant interactivity throughout the video.
Online video platforms (OVPs) first launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a similar promise to the once-iconic automobile brand: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. However, as OVPs evolved, partly to address our insatiable appetite for video, they became more and more complex. Tools for every step of the video-delivery process—from ingestion to storage to encoding, and so forth—came with their own set of shiny knobs and dials. Configurations and procedures for even trivial tasks required a study of user manuals, causing disenchantment, stress, and aversion all around. Cloudinary is excited to be launching new, game-changing video-management capabilities today to tackle that challenge.
As discussed in this SpeedCurve blog post, video use on the Internet over the past decade has been exploding.
Accompanying that growth is additional bandwidth, which is burdensome for your IT budget and for your visitors. Beyond the expense, you must also consider user experience. The heavier the page, the longer it takes to load, and the greater the likelihood that visitors will abandon your site. Plus, page-load speed is an important factor in SEO ranking.
Music videos, which comprise an important part of the video-streaming industry, are consistently the most-viewed content on streaming giants, such as YouTube and Vimeo. In exchange for free viewing, those channels serve advertisements for revenue. That business model creates a clumsy user experience, however, as a result of often-repeated ads that don't relate to the content.
Short-form videos—hero banners, product pages, ads, social content—are popping up on the web in places never seen before. This trend could become challenging because of the many formats and codecs, let alone inadequate expertise on what best to adopt for web consumption. Nowadays, most people are familiar with image formats (JPG, PNG, and so forth), but ask them about High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), Vorbis, and VP9, and their eyes glaze over.
Developers are always looking for new and creative ways to deliver content that resonates with the way users feel. Often using the latest technical innovations the market has to offer such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). What better way to demonstrate innovative uses of these technology in a consumer market than capturing expressions from your users and then serving content based on that expression!