An Act of Persuasion — Supporting Video Upload and Playback in Kindling

An Act of Persuasion — Supporting Video Upload and Playback in Kindling

You’ve probably noticed the rapid growth and proliferation of video content on the Web over the last few years. Here are some interesting supporting stats:

  • Video content comprised 59% of all global internet traffic in 2012.
  • The share of video is projected to rise to 86% by 2016.
  • Netflix, accounts for 33% of all night-time Internet traffic in the US (wow!).
  • As with most things online, mobile/tablet consumption of video is growing fast, and now accounts for 10% of all plays.
  • The younger the person, the more likely they are to consume content in video form.

This last point is extremely significant. Granted, this is a very small sample size, but I’ve observed that my kids (around age 10) and their friends are interacting with significantly more video content than my (40ish) friends are. When they want to learn a new dance move, see what roller coasters are at Hersey Park or check out a Minecraft mod, they naturally turn to a video instead of looking for a blog post to scan. When they have friends over, they make funny Vine and Instagram videos. Email and writing online are as archaic to them as writing letters was to my generation. Texting? They turn to FaceTime.

Video consumption is growing, fast, internationally, on all devices, and among all age groups. This trend is real and lasting.

Is this trend of video consumption limited to news and entertainment? What about during the workday? We’re hearing from our customers that they want their users to be able to easily share video content. This makes sense for Kindling’s use case — as articulating, sharing and discussing ideas is an act of persuasion. You have a great idea for a new product? Great, let’s see it. Or let’s see you passionately describe it. And of course this is now easier than ever as nearly all of us carry around a professional movie camera in our pocket.

We’ve noticed that there’s a similarity between describing an idea in Kindling and describing a potential project in Kickstarter. In both cases, you have the opportunity to clearly convey your idea in the format of your choice to bring people on board. And if the mission is to convince others, video is a great choice. In their words:

A video is by far the best way to get a feel for the emotions, motivations, and character of a project. It’s a demonstration of effort and a good predictor of success. Projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%). We know that making a video can be intimidating. Not many of us like being in front of a camera. We also know that making a video is a challenge worth taking on. It says you care enough about what you’re doing to put yourself out there.

Lights, Camera, Action
We’re happy to announce that with today’s release, Kindling now supports video. We’ve been working closely with a few of our customers to develop this new feature — the ability for users to upload, share and play video content directly in Kindling. Users of Kindling can take a video directly on their smartphone and add it to an idea, or attach a produced video to an idea from their computer. The video will playback on all devices — desktop browser, tablet and phone. For years now we’ve supported streaming video hosted externally from Kindling, such as from YouTube or Vimeo, but we’ve found this abstraction to be confusing to our users. We’ve often heard, “I have this video on my desktop / on my phone, why can’t I just upload it to Kindling?”. Now you can.

Over the last year we’ve continued to invest in making it easy to share all forms of media in Kindling, and today is another big step in that direction. So pull out your camera and describe your idea the old fashioned way — by speaking it. Or produce a video demonstrating the essence of your idea. Put in your best effort to persuade others that your idea is worth investing in, this is the essential process of innovation.

Bonus: We’ve built video support to be configurable per Kindling Account. So if you don’t want your participants using video in your organization’s Kindling, you can easily disable it.

Full release notes can be found here.