Free Online Video Players and Social Media Applications

Last week we had a chat with Daisy Whitney of TV Week about the way customers use KickApps’ online video players and our social media applications. We talked about how it costs publishers absolutely nothing to use our platform to build highly engaging social networks that are chock full of social media applications like user-generated content, online video players and widgets for viral syndication of content. In this week’s New Media Minute, Daisy hit on this very point (see clip below).

In our Ad Inventory Network, any publisher can create and deploy the entire KickApps suite of social media applications for free. This means a number of things. The most obvious being that we’ve removed the barriers to entry to social media for any publisher. Another is that we’re not hiding anything–you can see and use everything that we’ve got to offer at no cost. This eliminates the risk and uncertainty for any publisher evaluating vendors in our space.

When we talk to our customers, we often hear about the hefty cost of up front investment, fat custom development fees, etc., before they can even get their hands on a product and start using it. We believe in removing risk and showing upside right away. This is one of the reasons that we’ve designed our business model this way.

Back to Daisy’s New Media Minute video blog. She notes that publishers typically go to a vendor like Brightcove for their video solution (some even use YouTube). While both are good solutions under the right circumstances, we think the ability to have video and program it should be available to any publisher who desires it.

On top of this, we see video as one of the many entry points into social media. Once a publisher has video up and running, oftentimes the next logical step is to begin implementing other social media applications, such as widgets to syndicate the video, or social networking features to create a community around the video. You see where I’m going with this.