When I was in Israel two weeks ago I sat down with the guys at SundaySky. I need you to bear with me here because the service doesn’t sound cool outright but once you realize the power for commerce sites it becomes amazing.
Here’s how it works: e-commerce sites have lots of products. Take cameras, for example. You have a few set attributes – zoom, megapixels, etc. – and the rest of the incidental information could fit in a paragraph. So SundaySky creates a video using a product image and audio from a pre-recorded pool of preset phrases (“This W camera has X and Y built-in and includes a Zx zoom lens”, where all the variables are pre-recorded as well). The rest of the info appears as text in the video. That way you could talk fairly convincingly about an Olympus camera with a set of data from a pre-recorded pool and then add the small stuff as a visual. In this way you can make video out of every single item in your store.
The service is obviously limited to the amount of information you create. The quality here is a bit bad because it’s a blown up FLV, as well.
This can work with almost any site including a banking and apparel. The prospect for e-commerce is interesting because it offers a nice way to describe gadgets in plain English quickly and easily – presumably on multiple platforms – without a lot of hard reading.
This is obviously not for everyone and, in its current form, is fairly limiting. One image, some voiceover, and a couple of slides is not a detailed, hands-on look at a device, but with a little work you could feasibly incorporate that into the service. However, it does automate the tedious process of adding multimedia to staid product pages.
There is a set contract price for e-commerce providers and the service includes creative services and video generation tools. They were funded to the tune of $8 million in January by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital.