Topic - Online Video & accessibility

Defining ROI for Online Video: A Fluid & Frank Discussion

Mark Portu, CEO of The FeedRoom, looks back at the first 10 years of online video and offers practical advice on achieving ROI

Over the years, we’ve seen Web video evolve from a relatively nascent, one-way mass medium into a popular and far-reaching platform for delivering engaging, online user experiences. Not unlike the Web itself, online video has truly transformed the way that content creators and audiences engage, share, learn and collaborate. No longer viewed as “emerging” technology, tools for creating, managing, distributing and measuring video content have matured to the point that we enter our second decade in a business climate where online video is not only widely accepted, but also expected.

Flash Video Obsolete with HTML 5? Open Video Standards

HTML 5 <video> tag  – It’s the end of the world as we know it and Flash feels fine? No, probably not. with the prophesied coming of HTML 5 and the video tag, Flash could be on the very short end of a very long stick and the new messiah for online video could take the world by storm. In fact, without some severely significant reasons to continue using it I daresay that it could go the way of the Dodo in regards to online video. I mean seriously. Within a year or so we simply won’t need it (though Microsoft will probably either drag their feet or screw up the IE adoption of HTML 5 so maybe that’s 2-3 years).

Now, let’s not just automatically write off the old bird shall we? I mean it’s got a lot of things going for it, it’s the old flame we want to keep ignited, not just a Flash in the pan. We’ve been through a lot with her and well, some of us love her. Simply put, she’s everywhere. Everyone is using it, almost everyone has the plugin installed, and nearly every internet user has some idea of what it is so even if they don’t have it installed they’re more than happy to install it.

Online Video Subtitles Increase Video Viewing by 40% – New Research

In addition to the fact that subtitles can assist with accessibility and discoverability, subtitles can also increase the amount of time that a user spends watching a video by almost 40 percent.  In fact, where subtitles appeared, 80 percent more people watched the entire video to its completion.  This is an important indicator for post-roll video advertising as well as for those videos that have a branding message or call to action at the end of the video.

SES Search Usability Panel’s Recommendations for Video SEO

ReelSEO’s Contributing Reporter Erika Blackwell continues her coverage of the Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008 conference, and asks the Usability and SEO Panel – What usability tip do they recommend to clients when it comes to featuring video on their website? The panel’s reply: Include transcriptions and captions; plus include a “click here to read [keyword title]” SEO-friendly link of both the video and audio-only file.

Video SEO Tutorial – Using SWFObject 2.1 to Provide Alternative HTML Content (Part 2 of 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced Video SEO, Flash Video, and the importance of using SWFObject to provide alternative content for accessibility and SEO purposes. I explained why you would want to provide alternative content for your flash video projects and how to utilize SWFObject to accomplish this.

In Part 2, we’re going to dig into some code and walk through a tutorial for using SWFObject 2.1. Let’s jump in.

Video SEO Tip – Using SWFObject 2.1 to Provide Alternative HTML Content (Part 1 of 2)

The rise of online video content has led to many questions about Website Video SEO, or how to optimize your videos on your website so they can be crawled and indexed by the search engines.  From a best practices standpoint, there are several things you can do in order to properly optimize your video content (and those items have been covered here on ReelSEO in the past).

One important item on that list is ensuring you provide alternative html content for your flash video that can be crawled by the search engines.  It makes a lot of sense, but you might be asking yourself, “How in the world do I accomplish that?”  Well, that’s exactly what I am going to cover in this two part series.

Youtube Videos Become More Accessible – Auto-Translate Captions in Multiple Languages

One strategy in making your videos more accessible to a wider audience may be to include captions and subtitles in multiple languages with your video.  Adding captions and subtitles to your videos not only make your video accessible to those with hearing impairments, but adding them in multiple languages can help to drive additional traffic from non-English speakers and international audiences.

YouTube Offers Captioning for Increased Accessibility and Indexing

YouTube has been working hard to expand the offerings at the site and make the videos more accessible to everyone. One of the features they just recently rolled out was the ability to include captions in videos.

YouTube Speech-to-Text Recognition Functionality

YouTube, you know that Google-owned online video service, has decided that rich metadata may be the way to go. They believe that it could make a big splash and change the way that videos are indexed.

Adobe Works to Make Video Search Indexing Easier

We all know how much work it is to transcribe audio or video to text. Adobe knows as well and is doing something about it. Adobe is set to release a new version of Flash that will feature speech-to-text technology for automatic transcription and it will be incorporated into their video creation applications like Premiere as well.

HTML 5 Video Element – New Open Video Format Tags

HTML is of course the major language of the web. Over time the web grows into new areas not previously envisioned by W3C and the holders of the HTML protocol so from time to time they must bring out a newer, up-to-date, version of the language.  The current version of HTML is 4.

Video Accessibility, Closed Captions, & Video SEO

Many videos on the net simply aren’t seen because they cant get discovered. This can be due to lack of promotion, search engine optimization or effort on the part of the creator. But adding closed captions to a video may be one way in which to get some additional traffic to it as well as make the video accessible to those without sound-capable PCs (e.g. many office workers) or those with hearing impairments. Using translation techniques to provide multiple language captions can also drive additional traffic to your content from non-English speakers.