ReadWriteEnterprise

Over the years we have done numerous posts highlighting various TED videos. The videos are taken from various TED shows, which were started by Ricky Wurman in 1990. I was lucky enough to attend one of them back then.

Today the TED folks have launched TED Ed "lessons worth sharing" with a blog post from Chris Anderson here. Anderson is the curator of the TED conferences and isn't the same guy who worked for many years at Wired magazine. The TED folks have a team of in-house animators to help turn the lessons into more interesting visual pieces, and they will be soliciting materials from other teachers too.

I use the service Wistia.com to embed videos on my blog pages: I have covered the company before here and mentioned their analytics and video player. Today the company announced another series of improvements to their player on their blog here that are worth considering. The new features go way beyond what most video hosting sites offer.

I've written about Wistia before, an enterprise video hosting and analytics vendor. This week they have made big improvements to their embedded video player, including more customization of controls, a cleaner look, and some other small touches. What was once a solid player is now a great player. If you are looking around for a place to host your videos, this should be on your short list. They provide terrific customer service and analytics features too.

For the past three years, I have been doing custom-made video screencasts for private consulting clients. These are moving captures of the images on a PC screen with my own voice-over narrations about IT-related products (you can see the entire collection here). And lately, more vendors have stepped up their own efforts to produce their videos as a way to explain what their products do, or as Mike Lee has said, what they might eventually do. There is also a growing awareness that these screencasts can be used as way of product documentation and support.

Let's talk about what tools you need, some best practices that I have gleaned, and some other places to learn more about this craft.

Panopto announced updates today to Panopto Focus and Panopto Unison – tools used by educational institutions and enterprise customers for video and multimedia capture and management. The latest updates include full HD recording and archiving, remixing and editing content, search improvements, and integration with Twitter and Facebook.

You would expect that if anyone has gotten deeply into social media, it would be college admins. For the past several years, researchers from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research let by Dr. Nora Barnes have looked at how quickly this adoption has happened, and their latest report shows almost total immersion. The researchers interviewed 456 college social network administrators from last November to May at all sizes and kinds of institutions.

Can you imagine a better way to promote your racing engine business than to take your Web site visitors, on a mind-bending video demo ride? For the last decade, Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines (NRE), in Chatsworth California, has been building the nastiest, tire shredding, frame-twisting, internal combustion engines, on the planet. They had to get a bigger dynamometer because the old one only went up to 2000 horsepower!
How do I know it's true? I've watched most of his absolutely awesome videos on YouTube.

As Web-based video becomes more prominent and more useful for businesses, the biggest issue is figuring out what resonates with your audience. You post a video and then what: how many people watch it all the way through? Should you have broken it up into shorter segments? Did you need additional details? Did people like the video and link back to it? Depending on the video site you use to share your content, you have a number of analytics and tracking tools at your disposal.

Buddy Media, the Facebook content management company we profiled earlier this year, announced that it will acquire social media sharing and analytics company Spinback.

And earlier this week Tap11 was acquired by AVOS, the new company from YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

These moves follow Salesforce.com's high profile acquisition of Radian6 in March.

Although enterprise video adoption is slow, several platforms are competing to bring the simple video sharing experience of services like YouTube to business users. Here's a look at five of them.

Each of these solutions give uses the ability to upload video, encode it, view and share it online and track analytics.