Review: Quick.TV
Aiming to breathe new life into the online advertising space, startup Quick.TV has developed a browser-based, off-the-shelf video platform with which it claims users can add interactivity to any video and publish it within minutes.
Its pretext is that while video communication engages viewers more effectively than most other forms of advertising, the cost of production remains high and accountability is low, particularly for the dominant online video ad preroll, midroll, and postroll formats.
“Most professional online video is originally produced for offline distribution,” Quick.TV co-founder Nick Bell says. “This noninteractive, linear content is completely at odds with the ethos of the internet.”
Quick.TV aims to counter this by directly linking video views to sales or other calls to action (CTA) to provide full ROI on video interactions.
“If the objective of a video is to sell a product, then the best metric is to mirror a paid search campaign and report how many views have converted to click-throughs and sales,” says Bell. Other sales and marketing mechanisms, such as offering forms to incentivise a viewer to sign up for an offer and RSS feeds for real-time stock and pricing updates, are also provided for.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is built in Adobe Flex and aimed at the self-service market of smaller video producers and digital agencies and the enterprise market for large-scale agencies and publishers.
Users are charged via a license fee plus CDN costs, which is billed as a number of playout minutes. An amount of hours are included in select bundles (typically £75 [about $122 U.S.] a month) with additional charges for minutes exceeding that.
Quick.TV was developed in consultation with members of the advertising industry over 2 years with £1.2 million ($1.9 million U.S.) in funding from angel investors and videoconferencing firm Northstar. The final product launched in July.
Aside from its performance, Quick.TV’s other main claim is its ease of use, which Bell claims has all the simplicity of PowerPoint but with a sophistication which far exceeds that—Streaming Media took a closer look.
Getting Started: Dashboard
After logging in the user arrives at Dashboard, one of four main buttons heading each page of the GUI. The others are Marked Videos, Channels, and Upload. All logical enough—Quick.TV makes a virtue of its “what you see is what you get” approach.
The Dashboard is an information area that includes an account summary (total videos, number of uploads this month, number of active videos, number of channels), notification of remaining playout minutes, and a Get Started guide. There’s also an Analytics summary for a quick glance at total number of views per video, most popular video, total number of interactions, and most engaging video. More on this later.
Figure 1. The Videos tab in Quick.TV’s dashboard
provides thumbnail images of uploaded clips (sorted by title or date uploaded) along with a simple menu allowing you to edit interactivity,
adjust player settings, get embed codes, and view video analytics.The process for uploading a video is as straightforward as with any browser-based module and is pretty quick (depending on clip length).
Quick.TV says best results are achieved if the file is a MOV, although all major formats (i.e., MP4, WMV) are supported. Videos are automatically encoded to H.264 format on upload.
The Videos tab provides thumbnail images of uploaded clips (sorted by title or date uploaded) along with a simple menu allowing you to edit interactivity, adjust player settings, get embed codes, and view video analytics (Figure 1). From here you can also share the editing process with colleagues or lock off access to yourself.