Market7

Capture Necessary Feedback With the Annotative Player

Our 4th (and final) in the series analyzing how Market7 provides a return on investment. We examine how collecting timely and accurate feedback through the Annotative Player module provides for a streamline process that cuts overhead out of post-production. [Click image to enlarge]

Manage Video Projects the Best Way

Our third in a series analyzing how Market7 returns on investment. This time, we focus on how money and time can be saved through the project management features of the Event, Task, and Resource modules.

Through the Collaborative Script Editor

We continue our series this week on exactly how Market7 saves time & money, this time by looking at our scripting tool, the Collaborative Script Editor. [click on the image to enlarge & be able to actually read]

(But How?)

Its clear how using the Market7 Creative Brief in the planning stage of your video production saves headache and time but what about money? We have been giving this some thought and decided to put together a little explanation on exactly how. (Pretty pictures drawn by yours truly)

Two thirds of our release cycles hone in on some singular theme, like attaching files to comments about videos that we launched a couple of weeks ago and the new time tracking functionality that we’re currently developing. But in between those two we knocked out a really nice stuff. Here are highlights:

Avid! Comments about videos from our Annotative Player module can now be opened in Media Composer synchronized with the videos being edited — just like what we accomplished for Final Cut & Creative Suite with our NAB release (demoed here).

2GB! We have doubled our maximum upload size, coincidentally around when YouTube makes the same move (next time it’ll be us out in front). Please note that we recommend using Flash 10 when uploading files above 1GB.

Logo!Our accounts from Line Producer level up have long allowed customers to displace our brand with your own, well now if you’re Producer Pro or higher (so upgrade already!) you can specify this branding at per-project granularity.

On-off switch!The account management page (“My Account” link in upper-right visible only to account holders (versus their admins or invited team members)) — anyhow, that page now includes de-/re-activate buttons and whenever a project’s deactivated its storage does not count towards the account.

Another on-off switch!Free Production Assistant accounts (upgrade already!) are still limited to five team members, but now members are not stuck there permanently but can be removed from projects (& also can be subsequently reinstated).

More acurate than ever!Our script running time estimation had been anchored on speech at 100 words-per-minute which is fine for drama and such when there are non-verbal passages mixed with dialog, but most videos are filled with speakers at a natural language pace so we’ve scaled up and now anchor on 125.

Coolest of all — four out of the six items listed above are based on ideas originally articulated by our users.

We tested the new version of Firefox 3.5 (download it here) and the results were impressive.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

We’ve actually done a few releases since the prior “New Release” blog post, but the new code that became live last week includes especially notable functionality that further enriches commenting on video content by allowing file attachments to the comments. Here’s a demo of that:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

One scenario we’ve thought about for this functionality is for our more sophisticated and video-oriented users to use screen-capture software for putting their thoughts together, much like I used screen-capture software for the demo above (some evidence of that at the very start & very end of the demo). These users could do a screen capture of the player itself — move the playhead around, draw on-screen, talk to their actions, and overall richly capture thoughts about the video on which they’re commenting. Then attach the file produced by screen-capture software to comments in the Anotative Player.

Other notable new features we’ve released in recent weeks include:

• Wider overall screen for entire video.Market7 application, effects of which include presenting video at 640 pixel width, so less compression effects for videos uploaded at that width, or some multiple or factor of that width
• Auto-complete when typing in character names that already appear in Collaborative Script
• Can modify name of an invitee from Team module while invitation is pending
• Free “Production Assistant” accounts can delete files from project (although still limited to 100MB of total uploads)
• Double arrowheads out & in above comment roll in Annotative Player perform expand-all and collapse-all for all comments and their replies
• Improved formatting and information in pdf export of comments from Annotative Player
• Reduced clutter in Annotative Player by collapsing several buttons (ex: Download, Replace) to a single “File Actions” drop-down button
• If a comment in the Annotative Player applies for a duration of the relevant video, so its time marker indicatesa span from a start to an end, clicking on that span will play the relevant duration (ie just from the start to the end relevant to the comment, not the entire video)

We consistently come across a common problem in getting new users to embrace all of the benefits of video.Market7. Customers have a great degree of initial interest and if they really use the software service for video production, they overwhelmingly love it.

The Problem: We have consistently encountered a gap between initial interest and widespread adoption. This is largely due to the fear of moving from their current system to a brand new video collaboration platform (even if it is broken, it is THEIR broken system).

One of our prospective customers in particular took the time to explain that what we need is a step-by-step getting started guide (Thanks Sean). It is not enough to have intuitive tools, we need to guide customers through their first experience.

In response to this, we have created a simple, getting started guide that will help customers onramp to using Market7. This is a work in progress and we are eager for feedback both good and bad. Enjoy!

PDF version

There’s an Opinion column in today’s New York Times by David Brooks admiring that the U.S. is distinguished by its constantly enterprising spirit. Yet he cites ebbs & flows in the phenomenon, especially in relation to economic climate. Correspondingly he considers us to currently be in an “astonishingly noncommercial moment” devoid of passion for risk, access to capital and entrepreneurial progress.

I’m re-reading his column and writing this blog post at around 9:30PM from the office, taking a break because I’m waiting for my colleague Sean to join me. I just summoned him because I’m realizing that it’s too difficult for me to decipher some crucial engineering work for an upcoming software release, without one of the actual software engineers who’s worked on it sitting by my side. Sean hesitated, not over whether to join me, but over whether he should hop right away or wait for the dinner he just ordered. I encouraged him to eat. There’s plenty for me to do in mean time — write a blog post for one thing.

Sean and I, and our colleagues, and our friends with many similar and related companies to ours are having experiences starkly different than what Brooks describes. At Market7 we are delivering and enhancing Web-based services that drive the collaboration necessary for organizations to take advantage of declining video production costs and rising, diversifying video consumption.

The prior sentence strings together several secular trends that are occurring. They may be occurring right now at a slower pace than they would in a more bouyant economy, although even elements of that are debatable. With nearly absolute confidence in the big picture of what we’re doing, we hold onto our company’s founding goals, and strive to progress in ways that are efficient and reflective of challenging elements of our climate.

It is beautiful that efforts we make both to realize our big picture and to adapt to the climate enormously benefit from innovations around us, very consistent with the sorts of innovations we ourselves provide to the market we serve. What we are doing in each of these areas merit their own blog posts, and several we have already posted about, but some of the things we leverage to efficiently advance as an entrepreneurial company during 2009 include:

• Using open-source Ruby-on-Rails environment to rapidly develop
• Leveraging an on-line community forum for our customer support
• Providing subscription-based software-as-a-service
• Incremental financing through convertible notes with warrant coverage
• Operating from shared executive office space
• Test-driven, agile development
• Hosting our service in the cloud
• Rapid, free, viral marketing by Twitter and blog
• A steady work pace to sustain frequent release cycles, but resilience to dig in for a late one when called for, like tonight

We are moving forward, with determination, like others we know, buoyed by the very current phenomena listed above which are themselves birthed by highly entrepreneurial efforts. We’ll be poised when markets are ready for us to be big, and in the mean time we’ve got some notions we’re validating about how to succeed and progress while small. Quantitatively our impact may not yet be headline-whorthy, but I know that the “hard pendulum swing” that David Brooks anticipates, back towards “energy and drive, and eventually the spirit of commercial optimisim” is already underway.