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Articles and news | A Conversation with 23 Video: The video platform everyone is talking about

Created by Thomas Webster   |  December 10, 2010 14:27

23 Video is a Danish startup getting increasing attention in the global online video platform world. Their stated aim is to democratize web video for enterprise by lowering the entry point in terms of price and technological complexity, allowing brands and organizations easy and affordable access to a customized video site and platform. Influential technology blog TechCrunch recently described the 23 Video model as a ‘WordPress for video’ and Poets and Plumbers got in touch with co-founder and CTO Steffen Tiedemann Christensen to ask him a few questions about the 23 Video platform and how their offering is being used by brands and marketers to engage with web video.

Poets and Plumbers: What was the thinking behind 23 Video?

Steffen Tiedemann Christensen: 23 Video is our way of offering a web-native video solution for companies and organizations. I heard someone say recently that video is the last orphan child of the web, and I think that’s completely true: Video has been treated as simple and embeddable add-ons to existing text-only websites, rather than rethinking how we can communicate with video: Campaigns, training materials, engagement around events, quality control, internal communications and so on.

The aim of 23 Video was to create the flexible building block for organizations to actually use video as an integrated part of their work—all while retaining the brand values of their own domain, their own design and their own relationship to users.

P&P: How would you describe your model?

STC: Simplicity and transparency. We are making it easy for customers to get started by offering a free, full-featured trial, and we are making the choice transparent by having only one price for everything, $675 per month. So rather than working with complex price models for modules, storage, distribution or support, everything comes in the same package with 23 Video.

P&P: How do you see the video delivery platform ecosystem currently and how do you see it changing over the next few years?

STC: Up until recently the web video ecosystem has consisted of two opposite poles: In one end we’ve seen free, consumer services such as YouTube and in the other end, organizations have been doing big, expensive enterprise projects if they were serious about video. On the consumer services there has been plenty of innovation in terms of how videos are uploaded, managed, distributed and seen, but this innovation hasn’t necessarily been translated into the enterprise sphere.

At 23 Video we see ourselves as bridging this gap by bringing the ease of using YouTube along with the feature-set and brand-awareness of enterprise. This is also a way to describing the evolution of web video and videosites: That there’s a move away from centralization and a growing focus on using video for all kinds of communication.

P&P: What’s your take on the challenges and implications for marketers stemming from the increased emphasis on web video?

STC: Video is hard. I usually say that there are two challenges to using video well, a technical one and a practical one. With 23 Video, we hope to be solving the technical challenges—but for marketers this still leaves the ongoing challenge of actually producing effective videos and telling good stories.

We’re running about 200 different videosites for customers at the moment, and all these organizations are solving the issue in different ways: Some are spending significant money on freelancers producing high-quality video; some are hiring people into the organization to shoot and produce the content; some are experimenting with cameras themselves; and some are even relying on employees or customers to contribute videos. From a marketing perspective, it comes down to knowing exactly how you want to be perceived through the videos—and most importantly an awareness on the message just as with any other marketing activity.

I should probably add that video does solve a search engine problem. I saw a recent report from Forrester where they estimated that a video is about 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google’s search results than any given text page.

P&P: How can a brand benefit by engaging with 23 Video solutions?

STC: Well, that’s actually pretty simple since 23 Video is built to allow full control of presentation. With 23 Video you’ll have a videosite styled exactly to match the brand guidelines—including the styling of the video player. The video player design is actually quite important. Because when people embed your videos on their sites or blog, or when they post them to Facebook or Twitter, your branded player will be used. And it will be easy for your viewers to find their way back to the rest of your video content. In a YouTube context, the importance of having viewers watch more than a single clip and even come back to your website is usually forgotten. With 23 Video that problem is solved.

P&P: How do you see 23 Video evolving and what are your long-term aims for the company?

STC: On the technical side of things we’re really confident with the current offering, but we want to keep improving the product from week to week. For example, we offer very good analytics to our customers now—but we’re rebuilding everything in order to make it great. That’s the beauty of running software as a service; that we can keep improving and adapting to user needs and make sure all our customers can take advantage of the improvements without needing to upgrade or move to a different platform.

P&P: Finally what has been the reaction from the market to 23 Video’s new pricing structure and self-service offering?

STC: We’ve had an overwhelming response, and there’s no doubt that the offering and the price is disruptive. This has been a market with uncertainty over prices and we’ve seen long Excel sheets from our international competitors with calculations of extra costs on traffic, licenses, modules, CDN and so on. We wanted to move away from this and make sure customers know what they’re getting.

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