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Market7 and the news

Caught Meet The Press over weekend about healthcare legislation and international climate discussions. Market7 factors into these top-of-news topics.  Work is underway with our first health-oriented customer which publishes a broad library of video for people to be better educated about how to take care of ourselves, looking to video.Market7 for more organization and efficiency in their varying and ambitious production efforts. And overall we are enthusiastic about the environmental implications of helping spread use of video content to connect people and enrich communication without transportation, and for similar reasons about how we enable production teams to be dispersed but cohesive when making video. While we’re not appearing in this news, yet, we are grateful and excited to have beneficial implications for some of these important issues.

Customers Pick The Turns On Market7 Roadmap

While initially building video.Market7 we presumed that a typical production would involve sharing of a few cuts of footage towards the final product plus occasional collection of some integrated assets like graphics that appear within video. So we built our Files module to be a single, simple repository for everything assembled within a project, thinking that just sorting the list according to certain criteria would be sufficient to organize and find. In fact our customers are using projects in our service to collect much more content including storyboard elements, headshots of actors & scouting shots of locations, b-roll & other footage to be integrated into production, and various planning & organizational documents. Several have asked for better capabilities to work with larger amounts of documents and media typically assembled in a project so we are in the midst of enhancing our files capabilities, the latest aspect of which is folder-based organization:

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Another point that’s come up more than once from our users is that awaiting review, feedback and approval about content is a frequent source of anxiety. So we’ve included viewing of video, files and published scripts as activity feed generating items, whether or not the viewer makes comments. And instead of having to constantly log into a project to check its activity feed, we now allow users to subscribe to projects’ feeds by email, including control over which modules they want to follow and how frequently emails should go out:

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There are a couple other new features in this release, also responsive to customer requests. Uploading content now includes availability of an “alternative uploader”, based on HTML instead of Flash, that may prove more robust for large files (like 1-2 GB). We are working towards bringing such robustness to our Flash uploader too but there are a few current challenges for that in  industry practice,  acknowledged and under consideration by the relevant technical community. Also, video.Makret7 project-owners now have the ability to edit other team members’ comments in our Annotative Player which could be used to clean up clutter of comments after decisions have been made or to resynchronize comments if a file’s been replaced with a newer version that has timeline alterations.

Knowing is Half the Battle*

Your entire production team will know more (about what is going on in your video production) as a result of our most current release.  To start with, our Activity Feed was the recipient of a much needed makeover.  Now, right from the project homepage, you can instantly see exactly what has been happening on your video projects.

• Has the customer viewed the video?  Find out!
• Was the script updated?  Find out!
• Are they reading anything I am writing?  It’s right there in the Project Activity Feed.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Event Management page now has an easy to read calendar view to ensure you don’t miss or double book over those important production meetings.

And finally, as a bonus, we added an rollover image viewer to allow you to preview images with their relevant data right within the list, accessible from the activity feed, main File Management page, or media column in the Collaborative Script (no more clicking and waiting to get a larger view).

Here we demonstrate the highlights of the new features:

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* and yes, that was a nod to G.I.Joe (…the original series that is)

Bringing Home Our Month Of Stating Value Proposition

Except for a couple of posts celebrating our business with Google as a customer, there’s been a certain theme on the Market7 blog throughout August: emphasizing impact on our customers’ bottom lines. We provide our video.Market7 service to enhance the communication and organization of production, with results including making better video (to drive higher associated revenue) and doing so on-time and on-budget (to contain costs). The prior sentence’s parentheticals are of course the components of the most basic profitability formula.

Last week, Shannon posted four pieces of artwork & high-level text on which he toiled valiantly for vivid and entertaining illustration of how what we provide enhances profitability of efforts at each stage of video production. Those four pieces are now compiled together into a single one-sheet of collateral, avalable as a pdf at the bottom of this post. Week before last, we introduced our newest module, Resource Management, which is is the most directly reflective piece of our service about profitablity, keeping track of each participant’s contributions to a project and how that compares to forecasts and how it drives costs. And at the start of August, we put up an inside look at some work we’ve been doing with our excellent summer coleague Driss Benamour to model how video.Market7 can impact profitability. Here’s how that model’s shaped up [hit play + you probably want to use that full-screen toggle guy towards lower-right of player to be able to read what's on-screen]:

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Please contact us, as we’ll be thrilled to spend some time going over this model with you, get your practices reflected in the figures, and assess how much profitability you may be leaking that could be recaptured with better organization and communication through a solution like video.Market7.

I read recently about a study in the famous New England Journal of Medicine indicating that the success of medical procedures is dramatically enhanced by implementing regular organizational practices. These include assuring that all members of a team collaborating be familiar with each other and their respective roles, and that checklists be followed in completing procedures. Eight hospitals that participated in the study by adhering to such practices had mortality rates fall by nearly half.

The practices advocated in the NEJM piece are very much the same as what video.Market7 facilitates with our project management modules. We often tout our video-specific modules for undertakings like iterating on scripts and reviewing footage. But it’s increasingly clear from our customers’ experiences that we should not be sheepish about touting the attributes of modules like Task Management that allows utilization of templates with regular requirements for projects that can be prioritized, assigned to particular designates and scheduled with due dates, and Team Management that provides access to all team members with key information about them including specification of who plays what roles in the project.