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.

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.

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. 

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.

tinchy stryder barbour

tinchy stryder barbour coat

kelsey button

asher roth I love college sigma

silver domed girly coat

al wilson taylor swift

firetrap admiral coat

kelsey button all american rejects

whelans pub in ireland

schmoove lead grey

angelo frentzos

dezsosara.com

pixie lott fun facts

star in the hood ghana

tre cool buys leedy drums

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?

Clikthrough has partnered with EuroRSCG in building a custom video game site for Sony’s newest Playstation release, MAG.  In our partnership, EuroRSCG brought the innovative concept to build an interactive Global News Network showcasing how the epic battle began.  Clikthrough has joined with EuroRSCG to make the futuristic concept a reality, and to empower the user to clik on any item within the broadcast. This type of experience provides the user an opportunity to learn more about the story in real-time without taking away from the viewing experience.

EuroRSCG leveraged Clikthrough’s core player and customized the user experience to emulate the Clikthrough Theater.  As part of this launch, Clikthrough has brought global language support, closed captioning, and full customization.

I would like to thank everyone at EuroRSCG and the team at Sony for building an amazing new video game!

See the work here: www.mag.com

I wanted to let you know that Clikthrough has officially launched with Avex Group of Japan.  Avex is Japan’s biggest media entertainment company and we are ecstatic about working with them.  The first official music video released with Avex is by Misako Sakazume who is one of their leading artists. 

As part of this launch, Clikthrough upgraded its entire application suite to support over 25 International languages and locales.  Avex is the first company to take advantage of our Internationalization support, so now any Clikthrough encoded video can be seen in your own language.  Additionally, we went through an exhaustive optimization pass, the new Clikthrough Theater is now only second to YouTube in the downloaded size of our player.  If you compare our player to the other major players on the market, we have the most features built in natively.  We have built in natively what others consider a plug-in, and still managed to keep our player size smaller than all the other major players out there.  This is a major accomplishment for our engineering team!

You can check out  the new Misako video at:  http://misakosakazume.com/clikthrough/

Technology Highlights:

1) Clikthrough Theater/Player is second lightest player on the market
2) Theater Support for >25 languages

Clikthrough is very proud to announce that we have been featured in GDR’s Global Innovation Quarterly Report.  GDR is a high end strategy firm that represents some of the top companies in the world:  Nokia, Virgin, Apple, Harrods, Barclays, LVMH, P&G and more.  For this quarter’s report, Clikthrough was featured as the company changing the way the world consumes video.  We are very honored by this mention and want to thank the team @ GDR for taking the time to write about us.

Further, I would also like to personally thank Kate and her team for meeting with myself (Abe) while in London this past week!

Clikthrough & Sony Pictures TV have launched a great new interactive series called Woke up Dead, featuring John Heder of Napoleon Dynamite.  Woke up Dead is a webisode series that features Kodak as a premier sponsor.  Clikthrough has taken these videos to a new level by enabling users to “clik” on the characters to get extra commentary.  Additionally we have taken the Kodak sponsorship and increased the awareness by providing direct links for the users to get more information on the camera and even buy it. 

You can check out the videos on the Woke Up Dead site:  www.wokeupdead.tv  Today we launched 2 videos and continue to check back as more videos will be coming out.

I would like to personally thank those that helped make this a possibility:  Rob Wiesenthal, Steve Mosko, Bryan Bowles, Jim Underwood, Eric Berger, Raffi B, Derek Stoops and Katrina Moran!

Clikthrough has been featured in a great new Project Management book by Cisco called “PM Crash Course for IT Professionals.”  The book was authored by Rita Mulcahy & Martha Young.  I would like to personally thank Rita and Martha for including myself “Abe McCallum” in the book.  This was a great honor to be featured in a book that Cisco created on how companies can utilize project management to increase their effectiveness in the organization.  Clikthrough focuses very heavily on project management and greatly values the importance of effectively delivering on time for our clients.  This book is written exceptionally well and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to improve performance in their company!

Clikthrough is always delivering you the hottest videos and we have gone over to the UK and partnered with the hottest rap star coming out of Europe.  He is Tinchy Stryder and is Universal Music’s breakthrough star of 2009!  His first single “Number 1” topped the charts and now his new single “Never Leave You” with Amelle of Sugarbabes is crushing the charts.  We have debuted “Never Leave You” Clikthrough style on Tinchy’s site and look forward to bringing you more great hits from Universal Music.

With one partnership comes another, Pixie Lott, the young and attractive singer/dancer on Mercury Records.  Her first single “Mama Do” is on Clikthrough and it is an incredible video.  Pixie is poised for tremendous success and is already in the Top 10!  Congratulations!!

We also want to thank the team at Universal for making this happen, especially David, Glenn & Charlie, you guys are awesome.  Also a special thanks to Georgi @ DAS.