Content Management Matters ™

Traditionally reserved for awarding the best in television advertising, the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival awarded a Grand Prix for a viral online video, as well, as a cyber campaign. And a groundbreaking Japanese online effort for a clothing retailer won the most coveted creative prize of all, the Titanium Grand Prix.

What has happened to television advertising? It's gone online and become interactive, that's what.

Enterprise Content Management provider Vignette has announced new video products designed to help organizations deliver an immersive and video-centric Web experience. The products, Vignette Video services and the latest incarnation of Vignette's Rich Media Services, let organizations streamline video management and put it center stage in their overall Web strategy. These additions should lead to increased viewer time spent on site, improved customer engagement and more revenue using video as a significant source of site content.

Mochila, global online media marketplace innovator has launched Video Player 2.0. Poised to deliver "multiple, related videos revolving within the same player", it aims to be an asset to those looking to improve user engagement and sustainability.

With the ability to support full-screen displays, pre-roll and translucent overlay advertising, audiences are sure to revel in engaging, high-quality videos, while publishers benefit from a free ad-supported video tool for building their business.

Adobe has joined the ranks of the social media product suppliers with the announcement of it's Flash Media Server 3 product line.

Open source firm Editopia has just announced the release of NCode.

This is a server-side video encoding offering. Web developers can add video, in any format, to Flash. Under the General Public License, it costs zip zero.

NCode is cross-platform friendly and supports multiple codecs, including H.264, and PHP and Java programming environments.

Editopia may soon release an enterprise edition with support, as well as indemnification and rights for fee-based codecs.

Tuesday morning at ad:tech Chicago, big brands like YouTube and Yahoo debated the likelihood that the Holy Grail, sought after by everyone from Indiana Jones to Tom Hanks, is (and perhaps always has been) in the unlikely hands of advertisers.

With every new medium comes a wave of schizophrenic behavior in which old media titans express fear, reproach and occasional audacity at a "threat" that has seen no equal in history.

San Diego based Streamload provides the storage space and Taiwan's Cyberlink provides the software. A match made in heaven for producing, storing and sharing videos on the web?