Awhile back we put together a blog for merchants with suggestions on how to add video to your e-commerce site, noting how video can be a real shopping asset that helps you separate yourself from the competition.
Well, the Home Shopping Network (HSNI) has taken the concept of video on a shopping site even further, adding a high-definition stream of its TV channel right on its shopping site!
This feature has been running 24/7 on HSN.com since August, and it might just be the only hi-def complimentary shopping video component out there on the web. And while the typical merchant does not have a TV channel backing them up, HSN’s usage of hi-def video certainly provides retailers with a great example of how to employ cutting-edge technology to enhance a user’s shopping experience.
Powering HSN’s hi-def feed is Silverlight, Microsoft’s (MSFT) answer to Adobe (ADBE) Flash. It’s a rich internet application that significantly enhances banners and videos on a website. The stream took about four months to get up and running but it compliments HSN’s other video and rich media (such as Flash applications and Windows Media Files) featured throughout the site quite nicely.
Silverlight was chosen by HSN specifically because of its smooth streaming high definition video experience. This despite the fact that Flash has a significantly (95 percent) higher adoption rate in North American than Silverlight (25 percent), according to industry research. Microsoft itself estimates that Silverlight is only installed on about 60 percent of internet browsers worldwide. Quite simply, less computers have Silverlight installed on them than Flash these days, which could be a problem down the line if HSN hopes to continue attracting users to the hi-def feature.
HSN stayed the course with Silverlight, nonetheless, because it believed it was the superior product. Company officials really liked that Silverlight can automatically detect a user’s bandwidth and adjust the bitrate speed for the video stream accordingly based on the visitor’s web connection.
But they also realized they needed to streamline the set-up process for users who needed Silverlight, which to that point was complicated and difficult to understand. HSN worked with Microsoft to make downloading the Silverlight plug-in very easy for first-time users, with clear and easy-to-understand instructions and while adding the HSN logo for added piece of mind.
The result, once a user has Silverlight downloaded and running, is crystal-clear video and sound that users can rely on to make the most informed shopping decisions possible. Even die-hard HSN fans that miss programming can catch up on it with the new feature. And while HSN isn’t forthcoming with how much the new features costs or what kind of traffic it’s bringing in, being the first hi-def video stream in the e-commerce world can’t be bad for business.
If you’re a merchant who wants to try adding video to your site or you want to upgrade your current video content to high-definition, we suggest you head over to HSN’s site and take a look.
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