|
Electronic greeting cards literally will be a moving experience with a deal between broadband provider Excite@home, its electronic greeting card subsidiary bluemountain.com and Internet video provider VideoShare Inc.
The trio is offering a service allowing Internet users to create and send electronic video greeting cards or video e-mail using VideoShare software.
Gad Liwerant, president and CEO of VideoShare, says his service has made its business in the applications service provider space, supplying video tools and backend software to clients wanting to add streaming multimedia to their Web sites. With digital video becoming the mainstay, the service is being extended to home videographers.
Users-and not just Excite@Home customers-can go to the bluemountain.com Web site and click on the "My Videos" link. There, they can set up an account, use the video software to create their clip and then upload it with an attached electronic greeting card to a central server, where they can send it to multiple users.
"If they have a Webcam or have video of a vacation they can digitally drag and drop that video into the VideoShare producer software," Liwerant says. Using a streaming format dished out from a central server makes managing the thousands of clips more manageable for the network operator and the users because "there is no need to send away an attachment-no need to send large files-it's very safe."
Users can supply their own video or choose from a stock of generic footage, encoding it at several speeds to reach broadband and narrowband recipients. While there is no length limit for individual clips, user account size is restricted to 10 megabytes.
But in true Internet style, the video also provides an advertising inroad. So VideoShare also is working on software allowing advertisements that get sown before and after the users' video clips, Liwerant says. "It's something that at the beginning won't be out there, but it could be made available to the service," he says.
For bluemountain.com the addition of video is the next evolutionary step in the service, which has up to now been confined to simple flash graphics and text messages, according to Mark Rinella, general manager and vice president. The site also recently added a voice greeting option in cooperation with Evoke Communications, allowing customers to record messages attached to electronic cards. Rinella says that service has averaged about 12,000 users daily.
"People really use this," he says. "They like the enhancements to the greeting cards sent electronically."
With video, Rinella expects to boost by 70,000 to 100,000 daily the number of electronic greeting cards sent via Blue Mountain. To do so, Blue Mountain had to add extra servers to handle the load-and there is always the danger of straining partner companies including Evoke.
"I think some of things we are concerned with is the video-we never quite know how many people will jump on and use this," he says.
The additions have prompted bluemountain.com to redesign its entire site and make all existing greeting card files compatible with the voice and video components. Adding these elements raises the sophistication of the e-cards beyond simple text and animation, but at the same time bluemountain.com didn't want to make the product too complicated for users, Rinella said.
That being said, adding multimedia elements makes the electronic greeting card service more attractive to broadband users. "It's making an electronic greeting card a lot more than a paper card can be. As people move toward broadband we can do more things," Rinella says.
Liwerant, meanwhile, thinks the creation of video messages extends the use of video streaming beyond simply playing clips offered on entertainment and news Web sites.
"People have been talking about video for many years. At this point video is going to happen. The Webcams are very cheap-there are going to be 10 million out there," he says. "The moment it becomes a communications platform it becomes an important use."
|
