Vidyard

Vidyard is a software company headquartered in Kitchener, Canada that creates software to host and analyze video performance. Founded in May 2010, Vidyard aims to provide customers with the analytics and tools they need to drive business growth through video.

Beginnings

Originally starting as a fourth year design project at the University of Waterloo, cofounders Michael Litt, Devon Galloway & Edward Wu launched the company in August 2011. On November 17, 2011, Vidyard announced $1.65 million in seed funding from investors including; Softech VC, YouTube Co-founder Jawed Karim, Y Combinator (company), and GMail creator Paul Buchheit.^[1] Among the graduating class of Y Combinator, Vidyard was listed as second among five startups to keep an eye on,^[2] as well as fifth among the top 15 startups in Canada.^[3]

History

Michael Litt was going into his last year of school while he was creating short explanation videos for companies along with co-founder Devon Galloway. A majority of their clients were putting their videos online with YouTube and Vimeo, but were complaining about both products. While brainstorming ideas for his end-of-curriculum design project, Michael Litt decided to build Vidyard, to address the video hosting issues that his clients were having.^[4] After graduating, he applied to Y Combinator and began raising funds to launch the company.

Culture

Vidyard is known locally for its open and creative culture. Company events often encourage off-the-wall and humorous behaviour such as abandoned pool parties, and rooftop "gladiator" jousting. The company also hosts internal video competitions on random dates and has an active rap committee. Many of their events also involve supporting local establishments in the downtown Kitchener economy, as demonstrated by the company's weird obsession with an old local bar called Capers.

Vidyard is also responsible for the community minded cultural initiative called "Plugin" wherein it combines local establishments (restaurants, etc.) with the tech-communities workers to host paid events designed to introduce local venues to new residents in the community. All proceeds from these events support local charities. This initiative is Vidyards approach to making sure that Kitchener remains a "vibrant and creative community for all".

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Major Features

A/B Split Testing

Multiple thumbnails/splashscreens can be uploaded for each video. Percentages of how often each thumbnail will appear can be specified in a dashboard, and the playthrough clicks are counted and analyzed for each thumbnail.

Syndication

Content can be scheduled to push to multiple social platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. When a video is uploaded to Vidyard, it simultaneously gets uploaded to other services, along with the metadata and tags. In addition, videos from YouTube can be pulled into the Vidyard player, meaning videos do not have to be hosted on the service itself.

Call to Actions

Vidyard offers two different kinds of call to actions. A popout call to action is a customizable frame that slides out from the player at a specified duration of the video. Video marketers generally use this feature to "place a contact form, a buy button, a landing page, and more at the end of videos."^[6]

The second kind is a final call to action, which redirects the player or the entire page that the video is embedded on to a different location.

Player Customization

The Vidyard player can be customized by the user through a dashboard. The player skin (style of the controlbars, and other on-video elements), the colors, as well as animations can be specified by the user. Vidyard also offers watermarking on all uploaded videos. Players can be embedded via a script code, iframe, or lightbox.

Integrations

Vidyard's platform integrates with robust tools and pieces of marketing technology that is used by marketers daily. Some of these integrations include integration into various Marketing Automation Platforms such as Marketo and Eloqua, into CRM such as Salesforce.com, and into email campaign software like ExactTarget and Mailchimp. Recently, Vidyard has built integrations into Adobe CMS, Gmail and Outlook. These integrations contributes to what the competitive edge of Vidyard compared to others in a similar space.

References

External links

• Vidyard: How a YC startup is using YouTube to sell its own video hosting solution
• Waterloo's Vidyard raises $1.6 Million
• The Incurable Entrepreneur: Vidyard's Michael Litt
• Vidyard Features