Question

What video analytics tools shall I use?

I need to track:

. Start / Stop / Pause, etc
. Bandwidth
. Bytes downloaded

among others.

Answer 1

Right now, due to current technology, there aren’t any tracking tools out there that reliably track the various video players out there. Most embedded video players are encapsulated and offer little to nothing that javascript can listen for.

Currently the best way to the sort of metrics you are asking for is to put your video inside a flash object and hook actionscript to whatever events you want to track (like clicks on the start, stop, etc…). When the event happens, actionscript would then make a call to a javascript function on the page that triggers whatever variables you want to track, passing whatever value for the event.

The actual coding would vary depending on what version of actionscript you are using and what tracking tool you are using, but it’s the same principle regardless.

Omniture SiteCatalyst currently offers an actionscript module built for this sort of thing, so you don’t have to build it from the ground up if you go with them (and it’s actually done completely within actionscript so you don’t even need to throw javascript into the mix).

But building it from the ground up with other tools like Google Analytics or Yahoo Web Analytics is still fairly easy, assuming you have the access and resources to build your movie within a flash object.