Just over a week ago I wrote about a video experiment I’m involved in.  The experiment amounted to publishing a video version of an audio program published on the Just One More Book!! podcast website to see how an un-promoted video fared against its audio counterpart — a mainstay on the site.

Basically, I took about forty minutes to throw some still images into a thirteen-minute audio program and created a Quicktime movie which I uploaded to Viddler.  I then embedded the flash player for the video into the post.

The video was watched about three times more often than the audio was downloaded on the first day of the post.  Now, ten days later, the video has been viewed 2,100 times, slightly more than four times as often as the audio played/downloaded.  Aside from a mention in the post, we didn’t use any form of promotional campaign to raise awareness of the video.

We’ve received some feedback that there should be more visuals and more regular transitions in the video to keep the audience’s attention.  I completely understand that, particularly since I rushed the video together merely as a test.  The results are significant, though.  They prove that video players are far more obvious than their audio counterparts and that the general public understands video first and audio second — likely due to the success of services like YouTube.  As a result, we’ve moved the player for our audio programs (Podpress) to the top of each post and we have plans to do more with video.

I don’t believe in gratuitous use of video.  For example, exclusive use of video for a talking head seems to me to be a waste of bandwidth and offers little value to the viewer.  My intent is to use video to offer visuals that support and enhance the experience for the audience.  It’s more work for the content creator though it makes more sense to use audio for things to be heard and video for things to be seen.

There will be a discussion about this on next week’s episode (#121) of the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

PS. did you click on the image to see if a video or audio program would play???