Make anything in your video clickable, or add clickable media files, images, relevant icons, MP3 files, and more, creating a powerful interactive experience for your users.
Engage with advertisers and sponsors to pay for interactive links anywhere within your video. Share your interactive video across the internet, driving traffic back to your site or anywhere on the web through your clickable links.

While there is a free level of service that Veeple provides, you will have to pay for the interactive elements. Hosting is “in the cloud” so you won’t have to worry about bandwidth. I haven’t yet taken their online webinar that goes into more details of how to make the best of their service, but as I understand it, this is how it works: You create an account at Veeple.com, upload your video, then you gain access to their simple tools that allow you to add the interactive elements. Then you have your “Veeple-ized” video which you can then embed all over the web as you would any other kind of widget or video. Pricing is based on views, so if you are getting up to 5000 views of your video that will come for a flat fee of $49/month. Above 5000 views and it transitions to a cost per view, starting at $0.008 per view and scaling down in cost as you pass higher thresholds of viewing.

So if you have content which you think will be frequently watched, either because it is compelling viral content, or you have a network of fans, blogs etc that will re-post and watch your content, then it will cost you a small amount of money. But it gives you the opportunity to find a sponsor or advertiser with which to co-brand your content and charge them money for. Veeple provides extensive stats and tracking on the views of your video.

I recently had the opportunity to ask some questions of one of Veeple’s co-founders, Scott Broomfield, via email and phone.
He gave the general context of Veeple as follows:

To begin, think about Veeple in terms of breadth and depth.  The breadth is our interactivity, which enhances storytelling.  One thing is for certain, as YouTube has proven, people love to tell their story. The depth is our ability to add in relevant and non-intrusive advertising, which helps the publisher monetize their content.

Second, we are one of the few who provide a complete service 100% ‘in the cloud.’  With Veeple, you get the Video Player, the CMS, the CDN (we use Amazon), Full Analytics and Interactivity.  Nothing to download. No cookies. No add/delete programs.  And, our focus is 100% for the benefit of the web publisher.  One can serve only one master and our’s is the web publisher.

When did you launch Veeple?
We founded the company in early 2007.  We built the first alpha product by October of 2007.  We raised about $600K and built our first beta product and laboratory, where a few hundred people posted numerous videos.  We took this learning, added another $700K in our own funds and built our first commercial product. We launched the service – what we call Video as a Service or ‘VaaS’ about two weeks ago.  So far we have about 70 registrations/sign-ups.

Can Veeple-ized videos be uploaded to YouTube and other similar sites and retain their functionality? Or do they only work in the Veeple player?
The answer is yes from a technical POV, but no from a business POV as related to Youtbe.  In other words, if a site allows metadata to attach to the JPEG, then we run well.  Youtube, for commerical reasons, does not allow this.  Some other sites do, like MySpace, Facebook, Demand media, Stupidvideos, GrindTV, LP33 and others.

How realistic is it to create a video technology that doesn’t play with the leading online video destinations, especially for folks like independent musicians who are looking to expand their reach?
The content owner, and in your case the musician, controls where their content show up with Veeple.  We have comprehensive embed functionality that, if they allow it, enables any third party the ability to consume a video (including a music video). Further, we think that the content person will, by definition, continue to use Youtube due to their reach.  However, we also see the same content owner placing video on their own site and using Veeple to improve the messaging/storytelling and allow anyone to embed.  Keep in mind that when a video is embedded to a third party site, all the Veeple functionality flows with the video and can ‘trackback’ to the original web site.

Are you seeing any trends yet in your user base – Is it mostly people who have content, such as musicians or other content-owners? Or are you seeing advertisers/ad agencies using it as the next generation of banner ad?
Ouch, I would die if this became the next form of banner ad.  I hate banner ads.  We would hope that all ads inserted into a video would be done in a non-intrusive, relevant and engaging fashion.  Remember that the content owner makes the decision when, where and why an ad is placed.

Trends.  Well, most important from our point of view is that people really like what we are doing.  We have had over 40 meetings in the past 3 weeks and there has yet to be a single bad meeting. As to specifics, we do not yet have enough people to really have empirical data, but people seem to like to click on the video, if the ‘veespot’ is done well.  We have seen a CTRs of between 8% and 22%, which is very high.  We are seeing that people like to use both transparent spots (so the video still looks good) and images that look like they are part of the video.  As to adoption, our top 5 market segments so far are: How To, Entertainment, Politics (of course), Technology, and Social Media.

Do you have any examples of musicians using your technology that you can share with us – either anecdotal or sites where we can see it in action?
How about Paramore!!  That would be cool.  We are using one of their videos in our showroom.
http://veeple.com/showroom.php?video=music

Is there anything you care to share about how you see Veeple’s future shaping up? E.g. Ideas for added features in the future? The overall vision for the company?

Well, I am reluctant to discuss much because the world is very competitive and people move very fast nowadays.  That said, I can share with you 3 quick things: 1) We will be adding in MP3 capability soon (next month or so), 2) Dynamic Flash images, in addition to static images, and 3) a pencil drawing function that will allow the tracking of an object through a video (really cool). A couple of other really cool things, but I will not talk about them until we launch them. The vision thing is all about adding tremendous value to and for the web publisher.  To help them tell their stories, deliver their messages and, if they desire to do so, make money in the process.
In a follow up conversation I asked Scott if he could give some ideas as to how musicians may best use Veeple. He indicated that they will be adding MP3 capability, meaning that you could make an mp3, either a full song or ringtone, directly downloadable from the Veeple video. Since a Veeple video acts like a widget, meaning that when you update the video, it automatically and immediately updates wherever the video is posted on the web, you could use it to promote tour dates on  a real time basis. You can also link to buy tickets directly from your video and the tracking will allow you to collect stats on that – good info that you can provide a venue manager, promoter or anyone interested in booking you. You could add links to your various social profiles, homepage, retail sites directly from the video to drive traffic wherever you want. You could also use the service to include cross-promotions with sponsors etc in your videos.
Companies like MTV are looking at Veeple as a potential way to monetize their catalog of older content. They have alos been working with Vloggerheads.com who welcome Veeple-ized videos.

Veeple is in its early stages as far as penetration and adoption goes. But their service does allow for many more creative uses of video. So it’s worth looking into and keeping an eye on and seeing if you can come up with inventive ways to use it.