Politics isn’t the only thing changing on this historic day. Video is undergoing a major change as well. Congress now has its own YouTube channel. So if you want to know what your representatives are up to, check out the video channels for the House and Senate. And our new president is already using the video sharing website to make weekly addresses to the nation. It’s about time we got an upgrade from those outdated radio addresses. And if you’re working today at the time of the big inauguration, all the major news outlets (including ESPN) are providing multi-platform programming—set your TiVo to record the television broadcast, but you can watch online, on your mobile phone or even via video-on-demand after it’s all over. We’ve definitely entered a new video era—it’s everywhere—in politics and in the rest of our daily lives.

Most online video today is pretty grainy—there’s a lot of room for technology improvements—but video is certainly transforming from an entertainment medium delivered to your television to a whole new information delivery tool. It has become more than just a sit-on-the-couch, lean-back experience (although I don’t plan to give up my couch potato ways any time soon!).

Are you taking part in the video revolution?

One of the major customer benefits for supporting a mixture of video, graphics and text-based digital overlays is that each content format offers unique properties to be leveraged. For example, a well produced, high quality video typically offers the most eye appealing characteristics to the viewer, while graphics can vary in degree of creative time and production efforts. Text offers a most basic form of information conveyance, but typically can be the most dynamic in terms of editing and applying timely updates.

Ranking the typical production and creative effort required for each clearly places video production as requiring the most detailed and orchestrated of the three while text the most minimal. Customers can take advantage of the range of production timeframes and resources required for each by using each as most appropriate.

For example, a high quality video produced for a national ad campaign can be distributed widely and used many times without losing appeal to the viewer. Locally produced video can be produced in a more cost-effective manner than a national ad and therefore selectively used in an overlay application, for example a “talking head” picture-in-picture scenario. Graphics can range from very complex to very basic, but overall their production can be considered readily “leverageable” for the localization of supplemental ad information. Thirdly, text can be used for very short-term and dynamic updates of ad localization, such as Message of the Day (MOTD) updates to the primary ad or applied to the secondary digital overlay ad.

The advent of local advertisers being able to leverage a range of cost-effective content may be particularly relevant today given the current economic challenges to almost all businesses and markets. The ability to reuse higher production ad content that is augmented by graphics and text content should become a significant part of ad campaign planning, enabling advertisers to refresh their primary messaging over the course of weeks or months. Rather than starting a whole new ad production cycle, a periodic insertion of new ad content based on digital overlays could become a standard practice in ad production workflow.

For more background on digital overlays, please read my recent article in Broadband Gear Report, visit RGB’s Resource Center to download other articles and white papers on the subject, or read more about RGB’s advanced advertising solutions.