Since the YouTube phenomenon over recent years, video has seen massive growth but this is just the beginning….?

Billions of videos are uploaded and watched every day and viewer engagement through channels, comments and shares is an everyday activity across the widest of social demographics.

But YouTube and latterly the increasing popularity of Vimeo and others, is just the beginning of a more immersive video experience that is beginning to emerge.

Perhaps we should call it Video 3.0 because it's more than simply viewing and commenting. Now it's about engagement, collaboration and at last leverage of a financial return on the investment of time, energy and video content.

Zeeik is a social video curation website that allows users to collaboratively curate videos on the same subject, interest or activity. With similar functionality of 'curating' or 'pinning' to Pinterest, Zeeik extends the experience into more proactive reviews and social conversations as video topics evolve. Different to the increasingly popular Scoop.it where a topic is typcially owned and curated by one person the essence of Zeeik is crowd sourcing and collaboration and thereby improving the quality of the topic's accuracy, interest and applicability to the group.

Whilst interesting it's hard to instantly identify right now with how marketers can leverage a real value from this kind of service aside from the value of the evident conversations that will happen inside Zeeik. Perhaps more interesting on that angle is a suite of video-enabled engagement tools from the stable of Satsuma Digital.

These tools capitalise on the emotional impact of video using an interactive 'pause on demand' model which because the viewer chooses the videos they want to see and how they choose to interact, enhances the emotional drivers through a sense of being in control. The viewer sees the opportunity to obtain more information (when they pause a video and see related video-in-video or interactive links to purchase or get more information about a product or experience they have just seen in the main video) as an enhancement to their viewing experience. This increased engagement, which according to pilot studies has produced up to 50% click through rates to related products and services, is a clearly measurable method for leveraging financial value from video content.

Great examples of such video interactivity can be seen in the entertainment, leisure and tourism industry as well as in perhaps a charity 'pause and donate' model. With end to end reporting of the usage of the videos and their corresponding links and sub videos the true return on investment is easy to measure and this fact will certainly help to drive this next generation of video deep into the digital marketing mix.

Let us know if you have seen any good examples of next generation video.