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Static videos? Those are so passé.
Over the next five years, our video viewing habits will undergo a radical change, according to Basho Mosko, the VP of marketing for Boulder-based Rapt Media. This will be a boon to content creators who can glean more valuable information from interactive videos than static ones.
A software service platform, Rapt Media hopes to be at the forefront of the coming shift in video, changing the video medium from passive to an interactive experience. Boasting clients from Maybelline and local television company Gaiam TV to working on the series Banshee for Cinemax, Rapt Media is aiming high: the company wants to be the primary authoring platform for all video content of the future.
In their mission to take static online videos and transform them into an interactive experience for the viewer, the Rapt Media team said it has added a fourth dimension to production (video is typically thought of having three elements: pre-production, production and post-production). Rapt Media adds interactive production into the mix.
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An example of Rapt Media's Interactive Video Editor
This fourth dimension does two main things: first, it gives the viewer something to do, besides watching the video of course. For example, videos can have prompts where the viewer must answer a question to continue. Those answers determine the direction of the video. It’s like the old choose your own adventure books, but now in video. Second, this interaction provides the content creator with valuable information about user preferences in the form of cold-hard data.
Along with the rise in SEO and analytics, Mosko said their clients’ needs and wants were evolving. Clients are no longer happy with just knowing how many views a video receives. Especially for B2B clients, that type of data just doesn’t give enough information to make meaningful, informed decisions. Rapt Media provides data on clicks in a video and what the viewer chooses. The analytics provides a deeper understanding of what viewers want and like.
The company provides these analytics via direct links and time events. With direct links, a creator can overlay buttons on a video that link to something else; these are viewer-activated and the data on this can be aggregated for the client. It also gives relevant information like how long people watch the video. For example, if viewers tend to stop watching around 30 seconds, Rapt Media might suggest putting a choice in at 20 seconds to better engage the user.
The second set of tools are timed events; these allow a content creator to tag a moment in a video that will send a message to the website. For example, if viewers are watching a video that asks what city to visit in Colorado, when they pick Fort Collins, the website will fire a pop-up on the side of the screen with local ads.
Mosko thinks growth is likely to come in the B2B space, with opportunities in e-commerce. Rapt Media said they already have a big chunk of the market share, but there is room for growth in e-learning, entertainment and e-commerce. The company even has plans to make boring, stodgy corporate trainings into something interactive and fun.
With a mission to provide better videos and analytics to their clients, they’ve seen gang-buster growth of 30 percent over the past eight months. Rapt Media has 13 staff members and Mosko said they are on the look-out for talented folks.
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