Vidyard’s awesome video service just one-upped every competitor

You probably remember a couple of months ago when we wrote about Vidyard. The Y Combinator-backed startup took the gutsy move of doing online video in a very crowded market, but it shone above the rest by offering not only more features, but also making them look better than anything else we’ve seen.

Facing facts, the market is crowded because it’s potentially huge. But with the impending death of Viddler, YouTube’s penchant for displaying your competitor and Vimeo’s focus on the film-making community, Vidyard has an open door to own the market for professional, promotional video.

As time has passed since the initial launch, the team has put together even more features to this already-robust platform, and today we get a run-down of all of them. To give you an idea of what makes Vidyard so powerful, however, let’s start out by looking at the player.

As you can see, it’s beautifully done. But there’s a lot more than meets the eye here. In the background, this video is collecting real-time analytics, showing its owner a huge amount of information about who’s watching and when. Oh, and those analytics can be embedded, then viewed in real-time, as you can see below.

So that’s what Vidyard has been bringing to its growing base of customers. But the new stuff? That’s what’s really exciting.

Call to Action Pop-Outs – Let’s say that, at 35 seconds into your video, you have a product that someone would want more information about. Now, instead of waiting for a link at the end, or trying to catch it in the video, you can set a pop-out with that information to appear as the event happens.

URL Redirects – The problem with YouTube as a professional video service is that clicking on the video takes you to YouTube, where your viewer is then inundated with “related” videos from your competition. With URL redirecting, Vidyard lets you send someone to a page of your choice, right after the video stops.

Social Media Integration – While Vidyard has always been able to pull in your YouTube videos (that’s what really caught our attention when we first wrote about the company), now it can actually push your Vidyard content to YouTube, Facebook and even Twitter. Oh, and while it’s doing so, it’s going to give you channel performance reports inside of your Vidyard analytics, removing another page that you have to visit to gather information.

Video SEO – By automatically generating a site map for you, your videos are given the SEO juice that they deserve. Thumbnails for your content will also appear in Google search results, and you can easily share the codes with your developers for quick implementation.

Now, roll all of those features together with an instant-start technology (that’s right, no buffering!), a player that’s optimized to work anywhere, including iOS and Android and it’s easy to see why Vidyard is quickly gaining popularity as the video solution of choice for professional, promotional content.

The team is far from content to have things sitting where they are. They’re nose to the grindstone, working out new features and adding them faster than any service we’ve seen. A $1.65 million funding injection from the likes of SV Angel, Andreesen Horowitz and others is certainly going to help them along, but it’s really all about the team. CEO Michael Litt tells me that they’re 9-strong right now and “hiring aggressively” to meet the demand that Vidyard has been seeing.

We’ll be keeping up with Vidyard as time moves on, but the company is already in a firm lead over every other option that we’ve seen thus far. Its success is a testament to what can happen when you have focus, a great team and a quickly-iterating product and it should only get better in the future.

➤ Vidyard