Enhanced Video Publishing with Viewbix

One of the things I’ve always found frustrating about online video publishing is a lack of interactivity. For most of the existence of the web, integrating context into the video playback experience has been a huge challenge. In most cases, you need to provide the context by posting the video to a page like this one and adding any supporting elements to the page.

I remember thinking it was really cool to add clickable actions to videos with apps like Flash Video Studio, but that only worked with self-hosted videos, you couldn’t use videos from places like YouTube or Vimeo.

Viewbix is changing all of that. Now you can add email subscriptions, link lists, Google maps, photos, and numerous other points of context directly to an embedded video player. When someone decides to share the video on Facebook, all that context travels with the video, so you aren’t dependent on the Facebook viewer finding your website for more information.

You can see what I’m talking about in the example below where I’m interviewing Jonathan Stefansky, who is both CEO and a Co-founder of Viewbix. The interview focuses on how affiliate marketers can benefit from Viewbix, but much of the same reasoning applies for other use cases as well.

http://www.viewbix.com/frame/52590a6a-5c7e-4787-9c15-fc709393f294?w=560&h=382&

As I mention in the interview, the “light bulb” moment for me was seeing how a cabin rental was using Viewbix to provide more information about their rental properties. Instead of trying to include all of the relevant data on a website page, the cabin rental company included photos of the location, a map to the location, and other relevant details. They could have also included area weather, an option to sign up for their newsletter, and a printable coupon, if they had wanted to.

To me, that’s the real value of Viewbix. You can pick and choose the right elements to enhance your video so that people have quick access to data that’s relevant to them. Some of that data may also get included on a web page, but it’s right there so that the viewer doesn’t have to dig around to find it. I only just started using Viewbix last week, but I can see myself integrating the Viewbix player into most of my future video projects.

You can try out Viewbix with your own videos for free. If you want some of the advanced features and up to 100 different video players, you can sign up with the coupon code summer2012 for a rate of $70 for a full year.