Trends in video - automation, multilingual
Notes from a discussion with YourStory on the emerging trend of automation in video.
Where is video today?
Video is ubiquitous and every report, industry expert, and technology company talks about the dominance of video.
80% of the world’s Internet bandwidth is used by video
90 minutes of our day is spent watching videos
$32B will be spent this year on video advertising
Despite this enthusiasm, we are still in the early days of video.
We consume 12 times more text online than video
Businesses spend 6 times more on text and image ads than video ads
88% of commerce and listing websites only have images and text but no videos.
The pattern is clear - Internet users want to consume video but businesses are not able to keep up and scale their video capabilities.
Consumer interest in video is driven by a variety of factors:-
we spend 5 hours a day on mobile devices where watching a video is easier than reading
wireless and cellular speeds are doubling every 2 years
wireless and cellular speeds are halving every 2 years
messaging and social have made us comfortable with short-form visual content
Industries where video at scale is needed the most
The early days of online video were dominated by media companies and social-first brands who carried over their existing skills of storyboarding, content, and styling. Many businesses lacked such specialised skills and, hence, did not adopt video as a storytelling and communication format. Today, with the rise of short-form videos, video consumption on messaging platforms, and the growth of Stories and vertical videos, businesses want to convert existing text and images to short videos. They want to use such videos wherever they use text and images today - websites, apps, emails, newsletters, advertising. The shift in mindset is that instead of thinking of video as a completely new medium with its own learning curve, businesses now want to transform their existing digital content into video.
Rocketium receives interest from a large number of businesses but four industries stand out due to the relevance of videos for them and the scale of their reach.
Advertising platforms see big opportunity in online video advertising as more brands want to divert TV advertising spends to digital. However, most advertisers are unable to adapt TV ads to short ads suitable for digital platforms. They are also not able to create multiple variations of ads to test different messages relevant to different audiences. Finally, they are not able to create ads for all their products and services because creating each ad has traditionally been time-consuming. Given these challenges, advertising platforms want to allow their advertisers to create video ads directly on their platforms using a simple interface powered by Rocketium.
Marketplaces list jobs, marriage prospects, homes, cars, travel destinations, and much more. Many of them have visual content but very few have videos. Even those that do have videos only for their most premium listings. Just like advertising platforms, some marketplaces want to offer Rocketium’s interface to their users so they can create videos for each listing. Some marketplaces want to create videos automatically for every listing using the images and text they already have for each listing.
E-commerce companies are somewhere in between marketplaces and advertising platforms, where they have lots of products and want their users to purchase one or more of them. They want to use videos in multiple places - personalised recommendation videos in emails, how-to guide videos for each product, latest offers in push notifications.
Social apps want to increase stickiness and time spent on their apps and see videos as a way to do this. They want to explore letting their users to create short videos using clips, images, text, and voice using our mobile libraries and automation.
The power of automation and video has connected with a lot of businesses and we have also heard some unique use-cases such as learning videos generated automatically based on user scores, personalised videos based on user’s behaviour on websites, interactive videos based on chat responses, and data-oriented videos from analytics data.
Multilingual content
Apart from traditional businesses, there is a new crop of social and content companies who are ignoring English and focusing only on regional languages. Europe, South America, and Asia have strong precedents for this but this trend is now getting very popular in India. Several local language-only startups have approached Rocketium to create video content for their mobile apps and we see this only accelerating in the coming years.
Videos are a combination of clips, images, text, and audio. Creating a local language video could mean recording a video in local language, adding a local language voice-over to an existing video, or overlaying a video with local language text. There are challenges in each of these:-
recording the same video once for each language is expensive
creating a voice-over for each language is time-consuming
involving translators for each language is cumbersome
Given Rocketium’s early entry into a global market, we built unique features to help businesses create such videos. We are the only product in the world with automatic language translation. Unlike most software, we support text in any language. Our unique Google Docs-like collaboration feature lets businesses work with local language experts to tell videos in local languages without any video expertise.
Apart from our own investment in AI and machine learning, we rely on cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to improve language translation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text capabilities. This helps us create voice-overs and subtitles automatically. We are exploring partnerships with technology providers with better Indian language support than global giants. We are also working with news, social, and learning apps who want to help their users create local language content.
Trends in advertising
Online video advertising is exploding today for two reasons:-
we all are spending more time on online video
ad spend is moving from print to online channels
In 2011, the average person spent 40 minutes watching videos online and this number has gone up more than 2 times to 90 minutes in 2018. In 2011, $23B were spent annually on online video advertising and this has gone up 2x to $50B in 2018.
The shift to video is still in its early days and advertisers, technology platforms, agencies, and creative professionals are still adjusting to this shift. For example, most advertisers create 5-10 variations for every image and text ad and keep experimenting every day to identify ads that perform well. Compared to that, an average video ad is not updated for 3 months because advertisers do not have the right tools and processes to make such changes. Advertising technology platforms are also retooling to promote video ads. LinkedIn and Pinterest launched video ads only in 2018, Google employs a large team of creative professionals who create video ads for free for large advertisers, and Facebook launched a basic video ad creator in July 2018.
Advertisers have started looking for ways to expand their video advertising efforts and bring it up to par with image and text advertising that have a 5-10 year head start. Advertisers have told us they want to use video ads for retargeting - showing videos of products users have actually visited to improve the likelihood of purchase. Advertisers want to personalise video ads and show recommendations of specific products to certain segments of users. More tech-savvy advertisers want to use our technology to create several variations of the same video ad with content and style variations to see which one performs the best. The most cutting-edge advertisers and brands want to use AI to create video ads with computer-generated people that appeal to a specific geography and machine learning to identify the most compelling language in ads to get users to take action.
Rocketium’s web-based editor lets advertisers and agencies easily create multiple video templates. Our video API enables thousands of videos to be created using these templates similar to how personalised newsletters are created (“Dear Satej, thank you for visiting our store today!”). The advances in AI and machine learning will help us improve each of the elements of video ads from clips and images to text and music.
Parting thoughts
The shift to video is still in its early days. However, the path is similar to how physical activities became digital and will affect different industries and markets differently. Media and advertising will see a massive shift from text and image to video. Commerce and messaging will see huge contribution by video. Sales, marketing, internal communication, training, learning, and education are other areas where video will play a big role. However, video is not a silver bullet that will solve all problems. Ultimately, users are discerning and value their time. Businesses need to offer value and be deserving of users’ attention and just using video is not going to generate results. Technology and automation are wonderful tools but ultimately it is human creativity and storytelling that will move us.
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