ABOUT
Vialog is seeking this recognition to provide saturation to its innovative video discussion platform, which is supporting the UK's Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS) by providing a new way to interact with audiences on their websites. Vialog team is on the mission to unlock unheard voices and lower the threshold of async video collaborations for websites in order to empower communities.
Vialog hosts embeddable video discussions that are proven to grow engagement, sales and signups. With up to 7% of website visitors converted to content creators Campax 2021, Vialog also achieved 100% Year-over-Year engagement growth for an A-list film festival, PÖFF Black Nights.
Art communities like the Wendy Network use it for community introductions, while other art festivals engage their stakeholders in public Q&As. The Vialog team has delivered a decentralised technology for video lifecycle event hashing using blockchain and has delivered a transcription related R&D project to address accessibility.
CCS's community managers (CM) can start and manage async video discussions on Vialog's dashboard on their own websites. No app or registration is needed to join the discussion as a video opinion creator, ensuring equal accessibility. Anyone can watch and respond to videos on any website that uses Vialog, however only approved videos show publicly.
By using Vialog to increase audience engagement, CCS can generate new revenue through content marketing and social commerce. The platform helps CCS to attract new revenues by 1) providing an affordable and authentic alternative to influencer marketing, 2) adding video reviews to their websites (42% of UK museums accept donations/sell event tickets online, Nesta, 2019), 3) providing collaborative content marketing that attracts new business sponsors.
Vialog is working on a 36-months research with The University of Edinburgh. Top communities such as the Glasgow Film Festival, Business of Fashion, Textiles & Technology (BFTT) and Future Screens Northern Ireland (FSNI), two of the Creative R&D Partnership funded by the Creative Industries Clusters Programme all provided Letter of Intent.
COMPETITORS
Competitors Flipgrid/VocalVideo offer an asynchronous (nonparallel, without real-time interaction) video discussion experience; however, they do not offer native website embedding, instead navigate the user to their own platform for full functionality. They also operate on edtech/e-commerce markets rather than CSS. VideoAsk offers one-on-one video interactions with website visitors, but not many-to-many communication. Loom/Panopto offers screencasting with the presenter's camera, but audience interactions are limited to text. Creators must register and download dedicated apps. Zoom/GoogleMeet offer many-to-many communication, but only in synchronous environments which do not offer time zone-proof communication.
MARKET
The £110Bn cultural and creative sector is increasingly reliant on audience revenues as UK public funding has fallen by 35% since 2008 (Creative Industries Federation, 2020) and business sponsorship of arts in the UK is down 39% since 2013 (Arts Index, 2020). The pandemic hit the CCS twice as hard as the wider UK economy, with revenues dropping £74B (Oxford Economics, 2020). The key challenge now is to develop and engage new audiences for CCS in an increasingly online world of centralised social media platforms while preserving user security, privacy and copyrights.
Market drivers: CSS is restructuring its marketing expenses and increasingly searching for new sources of revenue (Vialog Customer Research, 2021). Additionally, brands are looking for new types of sponsorships that associate them with user-generated content (TheDrum, 2020).
WHY VIALOG
Vialog has completed R&D innovations now ready for commercialisation. With flagship pilots, Vialog already demonstrated increased engagement and content marketing for top CCS communities. Since 2016, the company has won and successfully delivered three R&D projects for Innovate UK and the European Commission for £700K.
