Understanding The Real Estate Video Space

Did you know that real estate video companies occupy different market segments and actually involved in helping you in different ways?

We've sat down and segmented the real estate video market below.  While not definitive, it does provide a beginning framework so you can better understand the types of services that different companies provide and understand the general real estate video space a bit better:

- Video Content Producers: These are the people that actually film, edit, and/or produce real estate video. Content producers can be companies or people that work independently on a full or part time basis. Their services can involve manual or automated conversion to online formats. Content producers can be video professionals or producers of virtual tour/slideshow content that is later converted to video format. Content producers are increasingly involved with simple manual distribution to free video portals or aggregators but their standard services may also end with the production of the video content itself leaving the customer responsible for conversion to an online format and/or online marketing of the content.

Examples: http://nashuavideotours.com or http://mlbroadcast.com

- Video Portals: Video portals exist for mass consumption of video. The intent of the video portal is to drive traffic to a given site and keep those visitors there. They almost always have an automated infrastructure to convert and widgetize videos. Widgets from these services are normally branded for the service itself to drive visitors back to the content site or the user's channel. Portals generally provide no direct assistance in the marketing of video content beyond the capability to organize content into user channels, embed portal branded widgets in other sites, highlight certain videos on the portal, or provide some SEO benefits for video content directly hosted on the portal.

Examples: http://youtube.com or http://vimeo.com

- Real Estate Video Content Aggregators: Content aggregators are similar to portals in that they exist to drive traffic to their own site that consists of groupings of real estate video content. Like portals, content aggregators often manage content using a channel model and have an online conversion capability. We should note that our best informed guess is that at least one aggregators in the real estate space might be actually converting videos manually based on published complaints indicating waits of up to three days for video conversions. One difference from portals is that content aggregators tend to focus far more on providing information, community, and tools for content producers rather than the general consumer. Content aggregators may also provide a more personalized value added syndication for highlighted content using email, blog posts, press releases, etc.  Aggregators generally have little or no responsibility/control over the production values, schedule, or work of the contributing content producers. In some cases, this can lead to a great variance in quality from video to video.

Examples: http://wellcomemat.com or http://mixpo.com

- Real Estate Video Agencies: Agencies represent groups of content producers on a regional or national level. Agencies may subcontract none, part, or all of their content production. Like portals and aggregators, the agency may have an internal capability to convert and manage video content or may leverage outside portals/platforms. The key difference between agencies and aggregators is that agencies generally have a common production value regardless of location and customer support for content production, hosting, and distribution is usually centralized. Agencies generally provide a wealth of value-added real estate video services and packages.

Examples: http://agentcasts.com or http://rexnet.tv

- Real Estate Video Syndicators: Syndicators are generally focused on providing lightly branded and white label video platform and distribution services to organizations and web developers. These services are most often focused on providing tools that help companies enhace their own capability to manage, brand, and distribute their multimedia content. Syndicators may also consult or train on the best methods for organizations to develop a real estate video strategy.

Examples: http://Vidlisting.com or http://forsalebylocals.com (online multimedia tools for web developers)

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Hopefully, this article helps you think about and understand the real estate video space a bit better. We'll likely update this article at some point in the future based on feedback that we receive about the space.

Tony