Second; trolling the booths, attending the panels, and talking to the participants last week I was struck by how much is going on with video and how diverse the community is. Again, one knows that, but a conference like this brings it home. There are big video companies like Yahoo (a keynote speaker); down to smaller creators just starting out as well as representatives from universities and the government sector.

A panel on video e-commerce had some interesting education and statistics. Ogilvy shared that in their cause marketing campaign with Sears, video emails get three times the engagement compared to emails without video. Their word of advice is that you should pick a video that’s moving, emotionally engaging and not just a reused ad. They described their efforts with video and an IBM campaign. Using video got them the # 1 organic spot on Google for their collaboration software — another example of video helping search.

Shopping Western Style was there and had really embraced video, even producing a TV show to support their store and brand. They quoted a 50% conversion increase in product sales with video, a 25% decrease in returns and a 593% increase in ticket sales with video. They too mentioned the SEO benefits of video seeing 8 of 10 first page listings with video and 90% on Bing and Yahoo. Some words of advice from the panel were shorter videos work better (60 seconds or less work best for e-commerce), tagging your video appropriately is important and creating engaging video is key, an important point though it’s a bit subjective. I liked this quote: “the biggest competitor for any company is for people’s attention, and video helps you get that attention”.

Systems to measure video experiences seem in their infancy and was also a topic on many panels. Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3 noted that paid video placements can be bogus numbers since 30% fall below the fold, the sound could be off, or some other barrier to usefulness and exposure is in place. The panelist from Razorfish was less than complementary of YouTube’s analytics and suggested Clickable as a useful tool.

HTML5 got some play (pun intended) at the show. In the e-commerce session, someone asked if HTML5 was important and the panelist said it’s a must support, that 96% of his mobile traffic came from the iPhone. While that speaks more to Steve Jobs’ religious war on Flash than it does on HTML5 generally, it’s an interesting point.

At the panel on HTML5 and open standards, a more a technical discussion, it was obvious there is a big interest in the topic (it was standing room only with people pouring out the door). The ecosystem is obviously early with a lack of tools, analytics, security and DRM. One content owner from CNET said they used HTML5 for a iPad application without many of those things. Their thought was iPads are still a small number and while they’d love to have all the hooks and help they have in their current Flash products, it was worth doing and releasing in 10 days to get out there. The sense I got was that while those tools and work flows need to be built and worked out for HTML5, they will be eventually.

The question was asked “what do we get better with HTML5″. While the obvious topics of a lighter less bloated experience and mobile were mentioned, one participant paraphrased a former Secretary of Defense by saying “It’s so early we don’t know what we don’t know yet”. But there was optimism that the new road would be interesting and innovative for video.

Speaking of mobile, that panel said that mobile was in many ways an easier environment for getting paid for video since paying via mobile is easier and people are used to paying for phone service. The panelists also agreed that mobile video was an “and” for their video not just an “or”.

And I’ll close with the tag line from the CMO from Kodak — if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures.

Below is a video from Beet.tv with Adobe’s Jen Taylor talking Flash players and innovations being made in bringing a high-quality presentation to streaming video.