Ottawa-based Overlay.TV officially launched yesterday. The interactive media company is offering marketers what it terms ‘a revolutionary video-commerce platform that will enable online video publishers to express themselves in a new way by personalizing and monetizing the billions of videos currently posted to the Internet.’
The Overlay.TV platform offers a simple way for publishers to unobtrusively link images within a video to marketers’ websites – instantly converting passive online video content into an interactive revenue model. Users can customize their video and embed the overlaid video anywhere, including on blogs, personal websites and social networking profiles. Overlay.TV has also developed a specific application to allow Facebook users to use their log-in information to seamlessly access the Overlay.TV site.
Overlay president/CEO Rob Lane says more than 600 marketing affiliates – including Amazon.com, iTunes and Wal-Mart – have already agreed to accept user ‘click-throughs’ from Overlay.TV. The platform is compliant with all major browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox. It can also be used by content owners and marketers to enrich their online video assets and encourage greater online community-building through interactivity.
‘By linking publishers, viewers of online video and marketers, Overlay.TV is transforming user-generated video content from a passive vehicle for entertainment or education into an interactive vehicle for commerce,’ Lane explains. ‘We’re empowering a whole new generation of publishers – a group we call ‘Generation P’ – with a user-friendly platform that will help them discover entirely new business models. The advertising industry has significantly shifted from traditional channels to web advertising. With the ubiquity of social networks, consumer-created advertising has more power and influence than anything produced by industry professionals.’
In a nutshell, Overlay.TV’s platform enables video to stream from most of the popular video sharing sites, like YouTube, MySpace TV, Google Video and Yahoo! Video. Publishers can overlay pictures, words and graphics on top of video and link to products or information on external websites. Users can then share the enhanced video via email, blogs, social networking profiles, personal websites and social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Digg.
With the Overlay.TV platform, publishers are also able to monetize their ‘overlays’ by linking to various e-commerce web pages. The platform provides publishers and e-commerce partners with tools to measure ROI and analyze resulting traffic to improve their advertising strategies, without increasing the costs associated with video production.
To see a demo of how Overlay.TV works, visit: http://www.overlay.tv and http://youtube.com/watch?v=qATtnwdXzEQ.
