Library clips

Slawesome and others enable you to record audio and send it as an email, the recipient will click on the link to hear the message hosted on the server of the service (not sure if it launches to their site or you can listen to it within your email client).

Anyway beside features such as video conferencing, helloWorld enables you to send video emails…click for an example on the film strip at the bottom of this page.

You can also set up the email message with personalised banners, making the email message look like a webpage (NOTE: this is not a free service).

So all you do is record yourself with a webcam or shoot a professional video and upload the file to the server, then send that email to your clients or friends.

When they receive the email, they just click on the play button on the video box (it takes about 10 seconds to fetch the clip from the server), and watch the video in a small box from within your email client.

At the moment you can grab a JavaScript code for each youtube clip and place that in a website or blog…from your blog you can view the clip that is hosted on youtube…I wonder if you can put this code within an email.

Back to helloWorld…

This video clip is not an attachment or embedded(?) in your message, it lives on their server and is streamed within your email client…in this respect you can’t log on to the net to receive all your emails then read the video mails offline.

Like any other email you can save these video mails, in that case, it would be great to save a video conference.
You could interview someone, both having a webcam (as mentioned before helloWorld can do live video conference), then save this conference (hoping you can view 2 boxes at the same time, one for each person), and then send this as a video email, or even put it in a blog post.

I wonder how long it will take till Outlook enables a videomail plugin, or maybe skype.

All you need is some server space, and to be able to view the video within your email client, and maybe some templates to create banners and information around the video box.

Examples

Many CEO’s send out a broadcast email to all employees every so often, these emails usually look like webpages, well now instead of or addition to this, you can hear and see the CEO give his address.

If this really takes off, I’d like a table of contents to go to relevant bits (like choosing a scene to a film on a DVD), that’s why I like text, because you can skim to what you like…maybe helloWorld could also offer a transcription so you can print the email, otherwise hear or watch it on your mobile device.

I can see video mail as a promotional tool for many businesses eg. Real Estate.

At the moment I get email updates for houses I’m interested in…what I get is a HTML email, pretty much what you would see on the web page. Imagine this with video features, I would no longer just see an image of a house, I could see a video of the house, right there within my email alert.

It would be a great idea to record video conference calls, and then email the video to people who missed out on the call, they can watch what happened from within their email.