Start-Up Watch COD: SundaySky enables websites to create dynamic personalized videos on the fly

Video is among the fastest growing media sectors in digital, and for good reason. Sight, sound, and motion all rolled into one.  

The downsides of video, of course, have always been the amount of time and money it costs to produce a high quality execution. While the development process has been greatly democratized over the past several years, most brands still view video as a “major production” (pun intended.) Additionally, videos have always been a lot harder to update than, say, text. And when you do those updates, you go back to the time and money challenges.

A Tel Aviv and New York based company called SundaySky has developed a remarkable new platform that enables web sites to offer personalized videos of site content on demand. The technology gathers assets from pre-defined locations in real time, and assembles them in professional looking templates that Sunday Sky develops for clients.

So, for example, an online store could offer a video for every product it sells by using the platform and defining the locations of  images and text fields that would be assembled during the video call. The consumer visits a site, sees an item that captures their interest, presses play for a video, and Sunday Sky grabs the latest photos and text from the CMS and mashes them up in an attractive video that highlights the item.

The process-oriented among you are probably beginning to see the tremendous power here. Say you sell 500 types of candles on your web site. You have a CMS that delivers text and photos to your pages in a common format. Well, by telling Sunday Sky where to get the latest content about an item in the CMS, the platform can instantly make a video of EVERY CANDLE available. One template, multiple items and asset calls. And when you update the content in the CMS, future video calls for that item will reflect the NEW text.

Ingenious!

Of course what works for 500 items also works for 500,000 items.

And that’s just what SundaySky can do on the simplest level. A web site could also have a template made that enables a user to compare different items of their choice, or one that grabs the latest user ratings and comments for an item. The videos are pretty nice lookin’. To ensure this, Sunday Sky has a team of creative talent that hand prepares a template for your needs at the beginning of your engagement with them.

It’s easy to see how this works for e-commerce. But it can also be very relevant for content and social sites as well. For example, the platform could take a news story and associated photo assets and assemble them into an engaging video experience. And since news sites also use CMS systems and common templates, the results could be just as universal and compelling.

Additionally, imagine the power of enabling individual users to have their own personalized profile videos based upon content they make available!

Here’s their value prop vid:

I’m not the only one who’s impressed. The company has already garnered a variety of large and niche sites as clients. One place you can see the fruits of this technology is on Overstock.com. Click here and then click the video tab for an example.

Great production values, broad appeal, and a remarkably simple implementation make this solution and company worth watching in the months and years ahead.