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Enough Bandwidth for Video Commerce? Yes, but.

As savvy Internet Marketers, are we shooting ourselves in the foot with rich media applications running on our key pages? Is there enough bandwidth out there to support our vision of Video becoming an essential ingredient of ecommerce?

A few weeks back I got a visit from a couple of friends from Uruguay. As dedicated engineers (some would say “geeks”), they connected to their laptops to my local WiFi network to check up on a few things back home. As they were doing this, I was seeing their amazed faces staring at the ping times to Google or Yahoo. 20-25 milliseconds. Sometimes less. Far less than the 200-250ms back there in Montevideo, a fairly Hi-Tech city.

If you’re reading this blog, you are probably part of this American or European Marketing Elite that’s on broadband at home and super-broadband at work. Like you, my YouTube videos play fine without interruption and I don’t mind the extra JavaScript glitz because it comes out instantly for me. But as smart marketers, is it safe to assume that the vast majority of our users are on broadband? Certainly not. Consider this Gartner study, dated July 2008, which estimated the broadband penetration at 55% in the US this year, leaping to only 78% by 2012. Yes, only 78% by 2012.

That’s got to be surprising. I personally never really challenged the assumption that there would be enough broadband for video. In the context of MySpace, and of course YouTube, who would think that so few people had access to fast Internet connections. Looking at the various Video Ad Spend stats (source: eMarketer) we still see a healthy user-base for video viewers (120M+ in the US alone), and solid growth moving forward.

Fine. Then what? Enough broadband for video commerce or not? The answer to this simple question depends on three independent factors: target audience, shopping habits and video delivery process.

1. Target audience. If your commerce site targets an affluent segment of the population, it is safe to assume your user population will be on broadband at home. After all, broadband is almost always sold at a premium over modem connections, and we can therefore expect to find a correlation between household income and Internet connection speed. If you are targeting the college crowd, you probably don’t need to worry about download speed either. This correlation of course isn’t perfect and you should dig out more into your target audience.

2. Online Shopping Habits. In the past recent years a number of very serious studies have concluded that a majority of purchases online were done from the work place, during lunch hours. If you work for a larger company, you may be the victim of drastic anti-YouTube, file-sharing or even shopping policies at work - and you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that the work place is where most people get their shopping and social networking activities done. A gross generalization of my point here would be to say that it doesn’t matter if people have DSL or not at home, as long as they have a job.

3. Video Delivery Process. Finally we’re getting to the most important point in this entire discussion - one that I’m adamant about: how you deliver video. I will share more thoughts on future posts about this, but in the context of this post, how you present video content to your users is going to be hugely important. Let me explain: if I’m on a bad day or simply in a rush to buy something online, and I go to the right product page on the right site, but with a video that’s autoplaying and slowing down the transaction, I’m probably not going to be happy. Video players these days are true bandwidth hogs, they take all the bandwidth that’s available for streaming the content. This competes with the bandwidth that’s required for other page components like navigation, banners, product images, etc.

Instead, I would prefer to be given the choice to play or not play the video, and as long as you don’t slow down the page too much loading a Flash player, I really won’t be that affected by it if I’m on a modem connection or not.

Conclusion. Unless your site sells to a target demographic that has no real options for broadband access, I would not consider bandwidth to be a real issue for deciding to go video or not. Rather, I would pay attention to delivering the video in a way that’s non-intrusive to the user. A delivery method that puts her/him in control of the experience with your site.

Will the iPhone play a role in eCommerce Video

In just a few weeks now, Apple will release their new 3G iPhone to the masses. Here is Silicon Valley, people are rumbling about it. I met two friends this week end who were delaying their phone replacements by a month of two to get an iPhone this time.

The iPhone is an important piece of the puzzle in the nascent eCommerce Video space. In case you haven’t heard already, there are a number of mobile startups who have pre-announced iPhone applications capable of streaming video content from their phones. Qik is one of them, but there are others. And that opens up a world of possibilities. Let’s imagine that:

(1) Site chat applications evolve to accept video streams from a Webcam, or a phone. This would enable retailers to engage in a more powerful and engaging experience with their customers.

(2) Brick and Mortar stores with “people on the ground” can connect live with buyers, show them products, answer their questions right from their desks or shops.

(3) Customer support staffs can ask their clients to show them exactly what their problem is while talking to them on the phone.

Most of these examples are futuristic, but if the bandwidth connection is good, if it is to use these video applications from an iPhone, and if the user experience is positive and profitable, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine this will soon happen. At least for some retail segments to start.

Omniture Adds Video Tracking to Its Analytics Suite

With their new version of SiteCatalyst 14, Omniture is the first Web Analytics vendor to offer comprehensive video statistics. According their press release, they now are able to track basic video stats for Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and the RealPlayer.

In the past, Omniture clients could track video by adding Omniture tags inside the Flash player, and configuring a set of custom reports. What’s new about this announcement is the fact that video reports are now available in the Omniture Reporting Interface. Also new are support for Windows Media, Quicktime and RealPlayer, though I expect tags to be harder to deploy for the three video players.

For video retailers using Omniture, this new feature is a good thing. However, stats will only be collected when the video is played on the actual retail site, not outside.

Via: Techcrunch (see article)