Humphrey Chen of CLIPr explores the untapped opportunities of video in communities
from Community Leaders Magazine - Issue 3
Heidi Williams spoke with Humphrey Chen, CEO of CLIPr, about how their powerful new tool is transforming video into a time-efficient powerhouse of repurposable content
HW: What’s the purpose of CLIPr?
HC: At CLIPr, we want to make re-engagement around video as effortless and as efficient as possible.
We think that not all minutes or moments in video are created equally nor are they equally relevant to everyone. So CLIPr uses machine learning to index every minute of video and make it searchable. We generate an automated table of contents and if only 5% of that content matters to you, or is relevant to you, we want you to be able to find that immediately
CLIPr uses AI and machine learning to index video into Moments that are searchable, shareable, and actionable
There are occasions where there is content you didn’t know you needed to know so we also want to provide you with the tools to find that as well. If you get 10% utility out of the recorded video that’s mission accomplished because you didn’t have to wade through the other 90% to find it.
When you think about recorded video and all the power that’s trapped within, the tools to actually more efficiently consume the video haven’t really existed until now. Part of this is because historically there hasn’t been a need to more efficiently consume videos. Entertainment video, like Netflix, is very different from everyday video because there’s a story arc -you can’t just pick and choose parts you want to watch because you won’t be able to follow the story.
But in everyday videos you can say ‘hey this part might be really useful for my work’, ‘this part might be useful for colleague X’ and ‘this thing might be really useful for my community’.
When someone is speaking, they’re aiming at serving their audience, but their audience is often varied. So, for us, we’re all about getting the maximum utility out of that video and getting it in front of the people that need to hear it.
When you transition into a 365 world, that means that the content can keep living and keep evolving throughout the year, and keep adding value. Those memories that would normally have been trapped in our head can be repurposed.
The tools that we’ve been focused on now not only help you to find those moments but also mean you can bookmark and save those moments. We want you to share those moments.
“Not all minutes or moments in video are created equally. We want to make re-engagement around video as effortless and efficient as possible.”
HW: Where does it fit, in relation to video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo?
HC: We host and manage your video in the cloud, like YouTube and Vimeo and then provide you with the tools that determine who you want to have access to it.
At the most foundational level, CLIPr is the player and so you can use it instead of the Vimeo or YouTube player. It also means you can stream to CLIPr and watch live events through it, react with emojis and have that be part of the metadata after the event is finished too.
With CLIPr’s live capabilities we can actually receive and ingest during the live event. As soon as it’s finished, we transition to the post event experience and the topics will show up, helping watchers shortcut to relevant points in the video.
CLIPr SimuLive invites reactions and comments during the livestreamed session, and delivers indexed video and analytics immediately afterwards.
Previous engagement from emojis also show up, helping prioritize which information people end up seeing when they actually get caught up afterwards or when they want to remind themselves what they had experienced.
The emojis actually really help you understand what people are engaging with in terms of content marketing and also in
terms of what else to push to them. They end up being your feedback. We have also gone one step further in reducing the friction, so we can ingest any existing content into Clipr from other platforms and formats. If you tell us how you want it presented, we work with you to get it perfect so you can send it back to your audience.
We eliminate the step that requires someone to have to upload, so we’ve made uploading and ingesting free because we don’t want to charge for that part of the experience. There might be charges associated with the customization around how it gets delivered, but we don’t want to provide a reason for someone not to try it out.
There is the default free experience and a modifiable enhanced paid-for experience. The other area where we monetize is when you want advanced analytics around what people are doing with the video. In that case you’re only paying for the part you value and nothing else. In a way we are really designing it to make it as easy as possible for you to figure out what people value and what they need.
HW: Monetizing can be a big challenge for events and communities, how does CLIPr help with that?
HC: From a monetization standpoint it’s more useful to think about it as a subscription, as an all-round thing rather than a one-off. If you think about passes and access to content throughout the year, that becomes a premium level where the CLIPr components of that content end up being all year-round content that people can actually access.
This allows for the collaboration and discussion to continue in between events. In the time between the events there’s also sponsorships and real estate, because when people are re-engaging with the video, you have extra eyeballs, you have extra impressions, you have all these extra things where you can actually populate the relevant advertisers throughout our experiences.
Event organizers can also sell leads to their customers based on what people have done with it, if someone has shared it, bookmarked it, or saved it, those are signs of higher value around what that user cares about.
Sponsorships can be persistent branding, traditional banners, or pre-roll video
In some cases, people want ads or sponsors and we’re able to integrate that in there as well. CLIPr is much more around having it your way, rather than being subject to the ads on other platforms. If you wanted it to be an integrated experience inside of your platform or if you wanted it inside your own website, we can accommodate that as well.
HW: How is CLIPr being used in Communities?
HC: Content is a key asset for many communities but, as time goes on and more content is created, it can overwhelm or great content simply gets lost in the volume.
Just because a video ended, doesn’t mean it’s no longer valuable – it just needs to be accessed efficiently to allow for re-engagement to occur. Then, you find the specific moments your audience engaged with and can amplify that to your wider audience. It’s a powerful way to unleash the potential of libraries of content.
”Inside Ideas” - a community of environmental thought-leaders and activists built around a podcast by global activist Marc Buckley
Helping community owners to index, bookmark and search community content is a game-changer in helping users shortcut right to the heart of what’s important to them. The content is always on, is searchable, so it’s easier for people to react to a specific moment in a video. YouTube comments are on the whole video, not on a specific moment in time, whereas our comments align with the moment-in-time it relates to, so if someone has an ah-ha moment, others can see exactly what prompted that response.
We’ve been working with Grip, a supplier to event and media companies and they’re looking at multi-year arrangements to gain insight around the engagement of the data. It’s good for us but it’s also good for the platform that ends up getting powered and enriched by CLIPr. It also says that the client values it enough that they can already anticipate needing it that far into the future. They are also looking retroactively about previous years content that they’d like indexed by CLIPr too. We think clipr could be an incredible value-add for community platform owners to offer their customers.
HW: What about customer to customer? Can somebody with a CLIPr account watch and share video with their network?
HC: Yes absolutely, that is the power of CLIPr. It doesn’t really matter what video it is - it can be stored in a drive, a zoom video, on YouTube – it’s all ingestible into CLIPr. At that point you can view it through our platform or you can make it public and just have it be a URL and it can be embedded into your platform.
We recently just launched CLIPr for Microsoft Teams, so for any enterprise that has all-hands meetings, CLIPr will index that completely for free. This speaks to the fact that we can make videos easier and more efficient to consume, which reduces video fatigue – if you’re at an event or in a meeting, if you’re not essential to that meeting, the ability to spend your time where you need to and be able to catch up and get what you need when you need from watching it back on clipr is incredibly powerful. Our analytics tools then help organisers understand what people watched, and for events or for communities that’s really powerful data – where it gets bookmarked, what gets saved, where people are reacting, all creates incredible feedback which is so much more powerful than surveys.
CLIPr makes community engagement effortless and powerful with its powerful video capabilities – sign up for a free trial here.