Clikthrough is pleased to announce the premier of four new interactive videos featuring the Japanese Pop Sensation mini. Clikthrough and Avex Media Group have created the interactive experience to showcase mini’s new song, GiRLS SPiRiT. In this series, mini teams up with brands such as Häagen-Dazs, Fuji, and Recochoku (a Japanese site for mobile phone downloads) to produce 30 second “pro-mmerical” videos. In the music video and the “pro-mmercials”, information is offered about the artist, her album, and the products being featured in the video. Be sure to check out the videos below:
· mini GiRLS SPiRiT music video:
· Fuji “pro-mmercial”:
· Häagen-Dazs “pro-mmercial”:
· Recochoku “pro-mmercial”:
A special thanks to Avex and their sponsors for having the thought leadership to commission these videos and bring the power of interactive video to the forefront once again.
Clikthrough is pleased to announce our latest project with our newest partner, Autobytel. We are very excited to partner with Autobytel in creating an interactive and engaging video experience to provide consumers on-demand automotive information.
Clikthrough worked closely with Autobytel to create a custom interactive player to launch the first twenty-five automotive videos. As you explore the player, you will notice the left and right panels were specially customized to display the rich content that was developed for the virtual test drive videos. Additionally, Clikthrough addressed a unique challenge within interactive video. As users are enjoying an automotive video, it may become difficult for a user to clik a on a vehicle traveling around a race track at over 100MPH. Our solution was to build Freeze Frame functionality that allows viewers to have more control over their interactive video experience by allowing them to freeze the frame of the video every time a viewer mouse’s into the video they are watching. This solution will allow users to easily “clik” on the highlighted features of the car in the video.
In addition to launching the new Freeze Frame functionality, Clikthrough explored new ways of improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In order to help Autobytel achieve a higher SEO value, Clikthrough worked with Autobytel to implement media RSS (MRSS) feeds into the Autobytel homepage. MRSS feeds provide search engines an immense amount of data regarding the content of the videos and in turn will allow the videos to become indexed and searchable.
As we continue our partnership with Autobytel, we are excited to provide new innovative solutions for the automotive industry and to create a unique engaging and interactive experience. As with any new technology, innovation is driven by key individuals that are willing to push the limits to create a better experience. Autobytel has several members of the team that accepted such a challenge and we are humbled to join them in the quest for automotive innovation!
Driving Innovation @ www.autobytel.com
After 3 months of development, the Clikthrough API version 3 is complete!
For those not familiar with Clikthrough’s API (application programming interface), this REST based web service allows 3rd party partners to access, add and update videos, P3 details (products, people, places), and other extended video information in the Clikthrough Interactive Video Platform (IVP).
Key features:
o Simplified object attribute names to create consistency and readability across the entire API
o Reduced each API response size by 20-45%
o Matched inputs and outputs allows for easy verification of uploaded data, and simpler 3rd party integration
• Performance improvement of 10% across all data calls
• Improved Security Policy – allows multiple companies to share the ownership of video and P3 details thus allowing multiple groups to edit/update the information associated with a video
• Enhanced Meta-data – more attributes have been added to core P3 (products, people, places)
o Places – Geo positioning tags (latitude and longitude)
o People – Twitter Name
o Products – ISBN (for books and other media)
These key improvements have also attracted two of our partners to build CMS plug-ins to support Clikthrough API integration directly into their existing CMS platforms. This achievement has allowed our customers to update product information/availability, and specific events happening at local places seen in videos. We are very excited to offer the API integration to our partners and look forward to launching new features and additional support.
Clikthrough recently attended the TV of Tomorrow conference hosted in San Francisco. It was a phenomenal event that brought together all the great thought leaders who are pushing interactive video forward online and through TV. Clikthrough was honored to be featured at the event and on an exciting panel all about “interactive video”
Below is a link to a video interview with Abe McCallum on the future of Interactive Video!
http://thetvoftomorrowshow.com/video/abe-mccallum-clikthrough-tvot-2010
Object Embed, also referred to as oEmbed, is a technology that standardizes how websites display sharable content from a 3rd party publisher website. Before this standard, there was confusion in how sharable content was displayed and additional technical challenges in scanning pages to find the shared content.
Clikthrough has developed the oEmbed functionality within our website framework which allows consumers to post embedded interactive videos directly into a message or wall post on Facebook, WordPress, and other oEmbed enabled consumers.
Additionally, Clikthrough has partnered with and been approved by all major social network sites to embed Clikthrough interactive video’s directly on the 3rd party pages. Clikthrough is among an esteemed group approved for this technology and joins the ranks of YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu and Flickr.
To give you a better idea of how this technology works, I have outlined a few screen shots below:
1. User shares a video page found on Clikthrough.com (or any of our oEmbed enabled clients) to Facebook.
2. The user writes a personalized message for their friends to see and at the same time, Facebook retrieves the video thumbnail and description from the Clikthrough page meta data.
3. Once the user posts the message, Facebook will pull the information directly from the Clikthrough oEmbed API and will return a flash embed object of the interactive video.
4. When the user looks at the wall posting, there will be an interactive video thumbnail. Once clicked it will load the Clikthrough embed player inplace and allow for the consumer to engage with the interactive content directly within Facebook.
For Clikthrough, the integration of the oEmbed technology represents a tremendous opportunity to help consumers more effectively share content and allow them to stay on their social network of choice. We are excited to continue pushing forward a deeply engaging and highly interactive video experience.
We are proud to announce an exciting Clikthrough partnership with Armani Exchange. Armani Exchange (A|X) is known internationally as one of the most forward-thinking fashion companies and has utilized Clikthrough to showcase their products and advertising campaign in an INTERACTIVE STYLEPAD.
The A|X design team worked closely with Clikthrough to craft an exciting interactive multimedia presentation using the creative assets from the sultry Bodies of Summer advertising campaign. Throughout the experience, Clikthrough and A|X partnered to bring a new level of interactivity to traditional fashion advertisements. In addition to viewing images, Clikthrough has enabled the consumer to go behind the scenes with the ad campaign’s models, hair stylists and make-up artists, listen to a custom A|X soundtrack, and get up to date information on how to purchase the featured fashions in the STYLEPAD.
Clikthrough is also very excited to announce the launch of a fashion first: Advertising Creation Tool (ACT), which allows site visitors to create their own advertising campaign images. These user-created ad images can then be shared via Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter and Digg. The ACT experience is a custom solution built for A|X to help facilitate a creative viral campaign element. Clikthrough and Armani Exchange have continued to push the envelope of interactivity and will be launching additional emerging media projects this fall.
We are confident that our partnership and launch of the STYLEPAD and ACT will impact the fashion world and push the limits in interactive media.
You can see the STYLEPAD here: http://www.armaniexchange.com/stylepad/summer2010.do
The NY Times did a special feature on the STYLEPAD. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/armanis-ax-brand-offers-quite-the-groovy-pad/
Along with this project, Clikthrough is proud to introduce a new social feature, Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows viewers to use their Facebook account to login and make comments in the videos on Shops on Demand and add products to their personal wishlist. . With Elle Magazines help, we are one step closer to launching an interactive revolution across fashion, entertainment, and advertising.
Stay tuned for additional partnership releases in the coming weeks.
Recently, Clikthrough launched a new interactive and custom video player solution for EuroRSCG and their client, Sony, that supported the launch of Sony’s new Playstation game, MAG. The original project scope included a customized video player with support of 12 interactive videos. Once we got into the project, we were asked to also support 15 languages and closed-captioning. We are proud to say that Clikthrough now supports over 20 different languages, and our player is the only one on the market that supports interactivity in this many languages. For other companies and web development professionals interested in this subject, we have provided the knowledge we gained as we worked through this project.
What is Internationalization?
Internationalization (shortened to 18n for most people that don’t want to type) is a work in progress for a lot of web technology companies. Very few sites have a formal approach to supporting internationalization.
Key Terms:
I18n – internationalization – covers the changing of languages to match that of the user. Keep in mind to overhaul an existing system you’ll need to replace navigation, error messages, tooltips or other helpers, and the big one… filter or translate all content.
L18n – localization – identifies the exact language and cultural settings for a user. Each locale includes that region’s formatting of:
• Dates
• Times
• Numbers
• Currency (both value and representation/format)
Locale – A locale is best thought of as a region (usually within a country). For instance, in Switzerland there are different regions within the country where German, French and Italian are the commonly spoken “local” languages.
ISO – The ISO (International Organization for Standards) is the world’s largest developer and publisher of International Standards. Throughout this blog, we make heavy reference to the ISO and the standards that it has put out there regarding internationalization.
Confusion in the Implementation of ISO Codes:
As web user’s we see many internationalized websites with language/locale codes in their urls. In some cases they’re added to the urls (url path or sub domain), and in other cases stored in session. Some examples are:
-http://translate.google.com/translate_t?ie=UTF-8&text=test&sl=en&tl=zh-TW – uses correct ISO code format w/ a dash
-http://www.mag.com/ja_JP/mag.html - correct capitalization, using _ (underscore)
-http://de.wikipedia.org/ - they’ve included language code as a sub domain (de – Deutsch, German)
-http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ this is actually wrong as it should be ch-ZH (Chinese – Simplified)
Confusion in the Definition of ISO Codes:
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale) defines the correct format as [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]. For example, Australian English using the UTF-8 encoding is en_AU.UTF-8.
IBM (http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r9/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r9.cbcpx01/locnamc.htm) defines convention as “<Language>-<Territory>.<Codeset>” yet the language/territory separator in all examples is an underscore (_). Also, it lists language codes with the first character capitalized (which is against standards) and there is also an error in the documentation in the language_territory separator, they list it as “Li-LT” (using a dash).
W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#langcodes) states that the language attribute’s value is a language code that identifies a natural language spoken, written, or otherwise used for the communication of information among people. Computer languages are explicitly excluded from language codes. RFC1766 (published in March 1995) defines and explains the language codes that must be used in HTML documents. Briefly, language codes consist of a primary code and a possibly empty series of sub codes. For example:
language-code = primary-code ( “-” subcode )*
Here are some sample language codes: “en”is English and “en-US”: the U.S. version of English.
The Actual ISO/RFC Standards:
The original language code standard was RFC 1766. That standard was superseded in January 2001 by RFC 3066 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3066). RFC 3066 was superseded in September 2006 by RFC 4646 & 4647.
Popular vs Standards-Based Implementations:
Here in 2010, you would think that this issue would be resolved given the standards have been in place for over 10 years. Yet, there still seems to be confusion over the standard of coding localization/language codes. In all the ISO specs dating from the 1990’s, everything was done with a “-“ (dash) separating the language and the territory (country) code. However, in many modern implementations seen on the web, people are using a “_” (underscore) to separate the language and country codes. The simple fix for us was to accept either separator in all externally facing interfaces/API’s (Application Protocol Interface).
Setting Things Straight:
Written in ISO code RFC1766, and subsequent amendments 4646& 4647 define the ISO code as follows:
[language[-territory][.codeset][@modifiers]]
In this example above, the language is in two lowercase characters as described in ISO639. For example, en for English, ja for Japanese, and zh for Chinese.
Further, territory (country) is two uppercase characters as described in ISO3166. For example, GB for United Kingdom (Great Britain), KR for Republic of Korea (South Korea), CN for China.
As you can see, there are a lot of ways to go wrong with internationalization and the language and locales are just the first part. Stay tuned for more posts on internationalization here in the future. To see an example of the internationalization work we have done, check out the Clikthrough player deployed on the www.MAG.com site. Clikthrough is the only interactive video player in the market that supports over 20 languages.
Avex, one of Japan’s biggest music company’s has made video’s more exciting by enabling users to click throughout the video on any of it’s content. They partnered with Clikthrough to enhance media engagement, making fashion and music video’s. They recently came out with an interactive tutorial that airs in Japan, showing how to use Clikthrough’s platform on the encoded video’s. This user friendly video is a great addition to what Avex has done in the past year and everyone is so excited to see what video’s come out next! Interactive media is spreading like wildfire throughout the world, enabling viewers to click and be informed without the hassle of searching through endless websites.
In order to achieve the best video SEO, Clikthrough has taken multiple approaches in making sure that all our clients’ content is both indexable and highly valuable to the search robots. Clikthrough continues to push the limits on video search by enabling you to pull out all the pertinent information in video to drive your videos to the top of search engine rankings. Today, we have outlined just a few pieces of our secret sauce as to what helps drive videos to the top of the rankings.
1. Sitemap.xml
A sitemap.xml gives search engine crawlers a map into where the content is located on your site, and also identifies what is the newest content, allowing them to quickly index this content for future searches. Clikthrough’s sitemap covers all the video pages, and all products, people, places, brands, etc featured in the video. By partnering with Clikthrough and using our sitemap.xml feature, your site will be more indexable and the fresh content will be easily picked up by the search robots therefore your video will be more likely to show up in the search results when someone is searching for something that is featured in one of your Clikthrough-enabled videos.
2. Video mrss feed
A video mrss feed is another way to let search crawlers know what content is contained in the videos on your site. This technique emphasizes the media by calling out key information to the search crawlers. The Clikthrough mrss feeds include information on copyright holders, all people and their roles in the video (musician, artist, actors, directors, etc), lyrics/subtitles (if available), and community/social features (ratings, favorites, comments, etc if hosted through Clikthrough). This adds additional value and deeper insight to the search engines and allows a deeper level of indexing of the video files themselves (which is impossible for search engines to do). Video mrss feeds will likely also be picked up by forward looking search engines as a way to find and eventually display media search results (videos, images, games, etc).
3. Flash alt content
Search crawlers today can’t look into your pictures and videos and identify what they’re looking at. Though it’s been discussed on some forums back in late 2008, real world evidence shows that search crawlers are barely able to index the content inside of flash files. That means that all your data you’ve collected and painstakingly edited and placed into your banners, your flash apps, or ads go unnoticed by the search engines.
By placing “alternative” content for non flash supporting clients (text based browsers for the blind and search crawlers) on the same page as your flash application, you can still give insight to these viewers as to what is contained in the flash app. Do to our process of collecting and encoding all the P3 (Products, People and Places) in your videos, we’re able to pull out much more information and detail than you ever could without that detail.
Conclusion:
Clikthrough servers can recognize the different Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo search crawlers and provide them unique content that is catered for their indexing systems. This information can be cached on our client’s servers and placed into the hidden content embedded on the client’s website. We use a proprietary mix of our in-video stream hotspots and other meta information to give the search engines higher value and more accurate times and placements of the objects in the videos. This results in better placements in the natural search results of the top search engines.
Below are a few key examples of highly relevant search queries in video that drive organic search results to Clikthrough.com everyday.
asher roth I love college sigma
kelsey button all american rejects
Today’s post was written by our CTO, Jeff Beaman and he leaves you with this: “If a picture is worth a thousand words” what can your videos be worth?