Month: May 2016

Elevating Digitization in Egypt For Media and News Publishers

Understanding the big shift In Consuming News:

Media Entities, Broadcasters and news publishers in Egypt Must Join the race and understand the big shift in consuming news, news video formats are going through a significant transformation.

Media Publishers Worldwide have gained audience and advertising revenue through creating a range of video output for their own websites and for distribution through social media. “Going Beyond Youtube with Online Video Platforms”

ONLINE VIDEO - STATISTA

Elevating Digitization in Egypt For Media and News Publishers:

Everyone wants to go digital. The first step is truly understanding what that means

It’s very important to understand that it’s a must to go beyond social Media with Online Marketing

Always the first thing that comes to mind with online marketing is social media. Yes, social media is a great way of marketing, but it’s definitely not the only tactic you should be implementing in your digital strategy

Another essential element of elevating digitization in Egypt for the Media and News Sector is to use an effective Online Video Platforms that measures, tracks, and demonstrates conclusively the significant impact of every L.E. that is invested in it

stream on phone

And As we can see that Egypt Media Industry is catching up with the digital race that’s why we decided to put lots of efforts on educating the community about the importance of digitization through a series of meetups that we have started last year by gathering all online content creators in Egypt in one place

Here is a glimpse of our last OCCEgypt meetup ” The Digital Media Industry in Egypt the Challenges and opportunities” :

OCCEgypt Group picture

It was a great event with lots of interesting discussions and useful insights and gladly we had a very special guest “Valentina Primo” a freelance journalist & a travel blogger with lots of international experience in digital media

Our last meetup had extremely useful discussions and debates about online video & digital media scene in Egypt So in this meetup we tried to better focus on the current situation of the digital media industry in Egypt, from the view point of broadcasters, newspapers, advertisers, professionals, freelancers, etc to draw an exact picture what are the opportunities, and also challenges that face Egypt to be an online content creation hub in the Arab region

Highlights of the event discussions:

Fady 3

Fady presented the Twitter Report of the top trending hashtags in Egypt in the first quarter of 2016 and he highlighted the following points:

  1. To expand the reach of your online marketing efforts. … Understand each platform to Know how to promote your content and on which social networks
  2. High quality content is the key differentiation on Social Media
  3. Going beyond just posting over social media, to the level of correctly understanding content creation & distribution tactics
  4. It’s a multiscreen world the mobile is dominating
  5. Having the video on your own site allows you to boost brand engagement to encourage customers to stay longer on your site
  6. With your own online video platform, you can create personalized, interactive video with clickable calls to action.

panel 2

Valentina Primo shared her expertise with the attendees and highlighted the following points:

  1. Each company has to have each own storyteller who masters the art of storytelling
  2. Human stories matter more now…make the customers the hero of your story
  3. Consumers are looking for inspiration or information, discovering new things, or making decisions so it’s very important to Optimize online content for social media and search engines
  4. Visuals…Visuals..Visuals is the key

perception

Fady and Valentina Concluded the Challenges that are facing the Digital Media Industry in Egypt in three main points:

  1. The limited Perception about online
  2. The Misuse of Technology
  3. The Lack of proper knowledge & training of Social Media

It was a very successful event #OCCEgypt and we have collected a beautiful set of pictures from the event

Stay Tuned with our monthly #OCCEgypt meetup there’s always something new about technology to present to our community! Join our meetup community today

 
by Nevine Adel on Online World

Reimagining the Video Player with the help of MICO – Part 1

How more context can help us revamp HelixWare’s Video player to boost user engagement on news sites.

originally posted on http://www.mico-project.eu/reimagining-the-video-player/

Our use case in MICO is focused on news and media organisations willing to offer more context and better navigation to users who visit their news outlets. A well-known (in the media industry at least) report from Cisco that came out this last February predicts that nearly three-fourths (75 percent) of the world’s mobile data traffic will be attributed to video by 2020.

The latest video content meetup - organized in Cairo this March with the Helixware's team at Injaz. (Images courtesy of Insideout Today)

The latest video content meetup – organized in Cairo this March with the Helixware’s team at Injaz. (Images courtesy of Insideout Today)

While working with our fellow bloggers and editorial teams we’ve been studying how these news organizations, particularly those with text at their core, can be helped in crafting their stories with high-quality videos.

More over, the question we want to answer is: can videos become a pathway to deeper engagement?

With the help of MICO’s media extractors we can add semantic annotations to videos on demand . These annotations are in the form of media fragments that can be used as input for both the embeddable video player of HelixWare and the video thumbnails created by HelixWare WordPress plugin. Media fragments, in our showcase, are generated from the face detection extractor and are both temporal (there is a face at this time in the video) and spatial (the face within these frames is located at xywh).

The new HelixWare video player that we’re developing as part of our effort in MICO aims at creating an immersive experience for the end-users. The validation of both video player and video thumbnail will be done using A/B testing against a set of metrics our publishers are focused on: time per session, numbers of videos played per session, number of shares of the videos over social media (content virality).

Now let’s review the design assumptions we’ve worked on so far to reimagine the video player and in the next post we will present the first results.

1. Use faces to connect with users

Thumbnails, when done right, are generally key to ensuring a high level of engagement on web pages. This seems to be particularly true when thumbnails feature human faces that are considered “powerful channels of non-verbal communication” in social networks. With MICO we can now offer to the editor a better tool to engage audiences by integrating a new set of UI elements that use human faces in the video thumbnail.  The study documenting this point is “Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram” and has been authored by S Bakhshi, D. A. Shamma, E. Gilber in ‎2014.   

2. Increase the saturation by 20%-30% to boost engagement

Another interesting finding backing up our work is that filtered photos are 21% more likely  to  be  viewed and 45% more likely to be commented on by consumers of photographs. Specifically, filters that increase warmth, exposure and contrast boost engagement the most.

3. Repeat text elements

As seen in most of the custom thumbnail tutorials for YouTube available on-line adding some elements of the title or the entire title using a bold font over a clear background can make the video more compelling and accordingly to some, significantly increase the click-through-rate.  One of the goals of the demo will be to provide a simple and appealing UI where text and image cooperate to offer a more engaging user experience removing any external informations that could distract the viewer.

4. Always keep the editor in full control

We firmly believe machines will help journalists and bloggers focus on what matters most – writing stories that people want to read. This means that whatever workflow we plan to implement there shall always be a human (the editor himself) behind the scene validating the content produced by technologies such as MICO.

This is particularly true when dealing with sensitive materials such as human faces depicted in videos. There might be obvious privacy concerns for which an editor might choose to use a landscape rather than a face for his video thumbnail and we shall make sure this option always remains available.

We will continue documenting this work in the next blog post and as usual we look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas – please email us anytime.

 
by Andrea Volpini on Uncategorized