Video analytics

Video analytics has arrived! Documentation is here. Once you have set this up on your web site, here is an example report you would see under the new Content:Video tab.




We've tried to make this as easy as possible for you to use, so we have two announcements to make.

Viddler

First, we have partnered with Viddler to make video analytics fully automatic. Any Viddler video you have on your web site, no additional programming is required, it will just simply work. However, Viddler's implementation of this isn't quite done, so this isn't available yet. But we expect it to be ready by the end of August, and we'll certainly let you know the second that it is.

Youtube

Youtube is the most popular video service in the world, so we have created our own Javascript library (with the help of Chris Nanney, the same person who created the awesome Google Chrome extension) to make tracking Youtube as easy as possible. Unfortunately, without a direct partnership, we can't make it fully automatic like we are with Viddler. But it's still very easy to implement, requiring just six lines of code for one video, and two additional lines for each additional video, on any one web page. See the docs here.

UPDATE: Vimeo!

A number of you requested a library for tracking Vimeo. We got this done today, it is available in the documentation. Unfortunately, it's a bit more cumbersome than tracking Youtube, because they require a lot more data to be declared when embedding a video. Also, their API doesn't have a method to get the video's ID or public URL, so you have to declare the ID for us so our code can build the URL automatically.


The example report above was created from the help of many Twitter users earlier today. We tweeted, asking people to go to this page and play around with the videos (we hope you enjoyed the moonwalking). You can see the actual up to date reports in our demo on the following pages:

- The main video report page
- Dashboard (we created a new module just for vidoes)
- Action log (we created a new filter to just view video actions)

Video interactions will also show up in Spy, although the specific type of action (play, pause, etc) does not - yet. We may add it, but that would require editing the Javascript, and if you haven't seen the Spy javascript - it's a doozy. We think just showing the fact that people are playing the videos at all is pretty neat to see in Spy.

Let us know what you think!

Oh, and if any of you developers out there want to create a library for other video services, let us know. We'll happily link to it or host it ourselves.