Case study: How PizzaTV found success with SmartVideo
Like many other businesses, PizzaTV uses video to tell a story and cultivate brand credibility with their hard-earned target audience. Embedding YouTube videos on their website created a poor experience plagued with slow startup times and stall-outs during playback. Then they found SmartVideo.
Powered by PMQ Pizza Magazine and considered by many to be the Wall Street Journal of the international pizza industry, PizzaTV is a video-oriented global guide to pizza.
Based in Oxford, Mississippi, PizzaTV provides consumers inspiration and education for all things pizza. Chock full of video-centric pizza recipes and stories, viewers are treated to a passionate, in-depth look into one of the world's most popular foods in all its glory.
Video tells a story
Like many other businesses, PizzaTV uses video to tell a story and cultivate brand credibility with their hard-earned target audience. Embedding YouTube videos on their website created a poor experience plagued with slow startup times and stall-outs during playback on PizzaTV.com. YouTube also funneled visitors back to YouTube via distracting 'related videos', buttons, icons, and logos, all while making PizzaTV look unprofessional.
This became unacceptable to Aaron Harris, PizzaTV’s IT Director. Mr. Harris wanted to find a solution that was free of YouTube’s distractions to their visitors. He searched for a solution to take control over playback on their site.
“Our goal was to speed up the playback experience and load times on the PizzaTV website and keep visitor attention focused on our brand in the process. We looked into YouTube alternatives like Vimeo, but Vimeo is heavily geared towards creators rather than businesses and doesn’t provide what we need as the latter.”
Mr. Harris found SmartVideo which he installed simply by copy/pasting a few lines of code onto their website. SmartVideo automatically downloaded PizzaTV’s video files from their YouTube channel, processed (encoded) the videos for all devices, stored them on a global delivery network, swapped out YouTube’s player to a native player, and accelerated playback.
“During our free trial, I set up a page with one of our YouTube videos side by side with a Swarmify video and showed my boss and our designer. I pressed play on both videos. SmartVideo loaded immediately; meanwhile, YouTube took 5 seconds to start playing. SmartVideo immediately became a no-brainer, and we’ve been a customer ever since. During deployment, we ran into some configuration issues because our website is highly customized, but your support was excellent and got us all straightened out. Sadly, YouTube offers NO support wasting endless hours troubleshooting problems when they arise.”
Traffic leaks eliminated
SmartVideo eliminates the traffic leaks back to YouTube and keeps visitor attention on PizzaTV’s brand. Their videos start 12x faster with 8x fewer stall-outs, all in a clutter-free playback experience. SmartVideo provided an instant upgrade of their website’s video to modern, clean, professional playback, meeting all of PizzaTV’s objectives!
Swarmify created SmartVideo around a simple idea; video is hard but publishers of all shapes and sizes deserve tools that create effortlessly uncluttered, accelerated, playback experiences on their website that load fast and look professional with all-inclusive dead simple pricing and automagic YouTube migration.