What makes a popular video?
There are two ways that I see this question…
1) How does a content publisher create and market a video to make it popular?
2) How do we, as a content marketplace, define a popular stream?
Neither of these questions has a very straight-forward answer. Movies like the Blair Witch Project come to mind as content that bucked the conventional way in which video content was published to become popular. And with regards to the first question, it is my hope that Neokast will become another medium to provide unconventional methods for publishing popular content within the broader spectrum of video entertainment. But the second question is more interesting to me.
The difficulty of the second question is made clearer when we ask, “If we, as a content marketplace, define something as popular do we have the influence to make it popular?” This rephrasing of the initial question illustrates the obstacles associated with providing a true filter to the audience in order to assist them with seeking out “hot” video content, especially when that content is being streamed in real-time. How do we highlight the most interesting content, and get it to the viewers?
The answer is simple… We will use a complicated algorithm that considers historical user preferences based on past searches and viewings, include viewer join/leave rates, raw view numbers, start/stop times of streams, acceleration of join/leave rates, and many other variables and statistically modified variables to offer you, the viewer, a better suggestion as to what you might like to see. But most importantly we will assume that our suggestions will always need to be better than they were before, seek the users’ feedback, listen to users’ advice, and incorporate users’ ideas.