The hits keep on coming. Chuck Norris has endorsed Mike Huckabee. If only the Daily Show were still on the air to give us free material…Not the Daily Show?

Oh well, just enjoy this obviously desperate ploy by perhaps the most conservative republican candidate in to get young voters.

Personally, it makes me dislike Chuck Norris more than like Mike Huckabee. And I don’t want to dislike Chuck Norris. It’s a little like when Curt Schilling campaigned for George Bush in ‘04.

High School sports magazine Stack has relaunched their website with a new online video portal offering training tips for high school athletes. Brightcove-powered StackTV currently offers 800 short-form video clips across eight content categories and the caliber of talent they have recruited is pretty incredible.

Above: Peyton Manning Talks Training

Continue Reading at Tilzy.TV

Baseball playoffs start on Wednesday and if you’re like me they can’t get here soon enough. Broadcast partners TBS and FOX will have complete exclusivity for live events, you won’t find live broadcasts online (at least not legally). But viewing options on the web continue to increase.

Through a deal with Joost, postseason games and highlights will be available on demand to viewers outside of the U.S. and Japan. MLB.TV will continue to offer game archives, highlight packages and special features to subscribers in the U.S.

Continue reading at Tilzy.TV

The Tour de France wrapped up this past weekend, and while it may not be a premiere sporting event in the eyes of most Americans, it still has a major worldwide following.

Despite being marred by doping scandals this year the tour has a large and affluent fan base, spread across the globe and frustrated by the lack of international coverage.

Online video offers a tremendous opportunity in this area. While it can’t solve the drug problem, a successful integrated web platform could improve access, and provide a better experience to cycling fans worldwide.

Continue Reading at Tilzy.TV

We’re live this morning from the Clickz Specifics Online Video Advertising conference. We just wrapped up the morning session on strategy (notes below), check back for updates throughout the day.

Conor Brady, Organic

What campaigns benefit from having an online component?

• Brands that want to differentiate their experience and build a story about a product or service. Not a sit-and watch entertainment experience.
• Should be relevant: online video should entertain and enable response.
• Consistent message across platforms, leverage unique capabilities of web.
• Motion Designers and technologists are now part of the creative team.
• Function before form: Architecture determines the shot list.
• Make it searchable, and allow customers to be c-creators download, “riff” and remix online content. User-generated content is not going to damage your brand if you respond to it.

An example is HBO Voyeur - an online only “brand piece” with many different online storylines which is very cool and will be used by HBO to get some press and buzz.

Rebecca Paoletti, Yahoo!

• 36%-38% of content is referral-based. Video search is a challenge across the board because of the metadata and the UI-functionality of finding video that people are looking for. Most video players are not optimized for search engines.

Troy Young, VideoEgg

• Internet is a fundamentally demand-driven medium. Not about viewership, about usage. Commercials that aren’t really entertaining, really targeted, really specific, and really helpful don’t go very far online.
• If you get it right you can move to the holy grail of engagement. It’s hard to standardize and measure - the amount of time spent, quality of experience, was it meaningful?
• Challenge to marketers - selling at much higher rates for much smaller audiences. Video takes time away from you. Marketers like pre-roll because it forces users to pay attention at the beginning, with a high possibility of engagement later on. But how to measure that action down the road.
• Video is expensive, huge shift of video consumption online. eggnetwork is taking videos and creating rich ways to generate engagement within videos. You can choose to interact with it, or close it and choose it later on the playlist.
• Experimenting with new formats (e.g. picture in picture window ad)
• It’s not about video content anymore it’s about interactivity blending with video seamlessly.

Check out Eggnetwork’s Examples.

Thanks for dropping by. This blog is dedicated to all things video. Our bloggers are professionals from multiple areas of online video, from advertisers engaged in viral video to developers of video distribution platforms. Combined, they bring a unique, 360 degree perspective on the online video industry.

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