Sunday Sky Builds Dynamic Videos For e-Commerce Sites

sunday sky

A new startup has emerged to make it easier for e-commerce and other online sites to add videos to their websites, in an effort to increase consumer engagement and purchase conversion. With its dynamically created video service, Sunday Sky provides those sites with videos that highlight product features but are always up to date.

Sunday Sky takes existing web assets, such as photos and product descriptions, and transforms those assets into a limitless number of web videos. Because the video is created dynamically by relying on product information, the videos are always up-to-date with the latest information from the website. So if a product’s price is reduced or its ratings change, the video will automatically adjust to the new information that is available to it. (You can watch demos of the Sunday Sky videos here.)

To get the videos up and running, Sunday Sky meets with prospective customers to discuss the type of information that they want to display, as well as the specific branding needs of the customer. It then maps video timelines to XML feeds that contain product information, creating a dynamic and seamless way to build an infinite number of product videos. Sunday Sky president Mitch Praver said in a phone interview that once the template and player for the first video is created, the second video and the millionth video can all be dynamically built without any need for additional input.

The benefits of video for e-commerce sites are obvious: Videos have shown to create higher engagement rates and provide a lift in purchase intent and conversions. Videos also tend to reduce product returns, as consumers get a better understanding of a product before they buy it. Zappos, for instance, is putting lots of resources into building up its store of product videos to boost engagement and conversion, with plans to produce more than 50,000 product videos in 2010.

But while Zappos has already invested heavily in creating those videos — building out ten video studios in its Kentucky and Las Vegas offices with three or four full-time employees each — Sunday Sky provides a cheap and easy alternative to adding video. Despite the fact that those videos lack the personal touch of being made by humans, their information is always up-to-date, which is a plus for giant e-commerce sites. And Praver said that engagement rates for his company’s videos on e-commerce sites is incredibly high; those videos generally run about 45 to 90 seconds, and about 70 percent of viewers watch the product videos all the way through.

The company raised an $8 million round of financing in January 2009, which was led by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. Sunday Sky officially launched its product in September of last year, and has since signed up about 20 different customers in the e-commerce, real estate, travel and even finance segments. Overstock.com and B&H Photo, both of which leverage Sunday Sky’s technology to create videos of its products in a number of different categories, are among its biggest customers.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Report: Delivering Content in the Cloud (subscription required)

Comments have been disabled for this post