Video Marketing – Pixetell: a Review

by Robert Love

I hope you enjoy this episode of ‘The Tuesday Tool’.  It follows a slightly different format than usual in that there’s a lot more content.  This week we have an interview with Sebastian Rapport, CEO of Pixetell and a Pixetell Software Review.

What is Pixetell?

It’s essentially software for recording the contents of your screen, your webcam and also enables sharing of documents in the Pixetell Video.  You can easily embed the recorded Pixetell’s into your blog or website or email a link to the recorded video on to a sales prospect or customer for example or collaborate with your web designer without having to spend ages writing what you want to say in an email.

A while back I reviewed a tool by Techsmith called Jing.  I originally gave Jing 4/5  and this article has reminded me to downgrade the rating to 3/5.  You’ll see why in the Pricing section below.

Pixetell are competitors of Jing and offer a product aimed at a similar market.  Dan of Pixetell commented on the Jing article and mentioned their Pixetell product which shows that monitoring your clients activities and even the comments of your competitor’s customers on websites, forums and blogs can pay huge dividends.  Since Dan’s comment, Sebastian kindly agreed to an interview with me in the form of a Pixetell Video communication (actually two videos from Sebastian and one demo from me).

Pricing and Comparison

Pixetell offer two pricing models (click to enlarge the image).  The pro version is well worth it to remove the 5 minute limit which is similar to Jing’s restriction.  However with Jing the alternative to the 5 minute limit is Camtasia which is a big jump in price and whilst Camtasia is great for editing, for ease of use and sharing options Pixetell is great and in my opinion better for all but perhaps more advanced video editing.  Most of us simply don’t need all the extras Camtasia has to offer.

Review:

I love so many aspects of this software.

• The Hyperlens webcam is great (see the second and third video below for more info), so different from the standard webcam that you see on most screen recordings.
• The ability to attach files is great for collaboration.
• Sending video in this way via email is a great sales tool.
• Embedding video in your blog or website is so easy.
• Pricing is very competitive and in reality seems to be a better option when compared with Jing pricing and size limits as discussed above.

If there is one downside, it’s that the Mac version isn’t out yet but hopefully will be later this year.  I experimented briefly with trying it with Fusion but I didn’t really expect it to 100% work.  There’s a feature called ‘Hyperlens’ which is the feature I couldn’t get working with fusion.  This is likely to be because it requires more resources and fusion couldn’t really cope so considering Pixetell doesn’t support fusion, it’s not really a fault with the software.

Perhaps a web based version might be possible, it would be very handy to give customers the option to reply to a Pixetell video with a Pixetell video directly within a webpage interface, a bit like a commenting system with video.  I think there would be plenty of primary customers willing to pay a bit more if they can give their customers this ability to reply to an article with a video comment.  With social media, this could be a great way to add interactivity to a blog/website.

Another thing I’d love to see is tools on screen to enable pointing on screen to make it easier to demonstrate things – google Omnidazzle for mac and you’ll see what I mean.

It was ultimately tested on a Windows XP based laptop as you’ll see in my video demo.  I ended up using Jing to demo Pixetell which probably wasn’t quite what I had anticipated doing at the beginning, for some reason the volume is a little quite so you may want to turn your volume up for my video (the last one in the list).  Sebastian’s answers in his Pixetell’s are good quality and they should be fine, I’ll do better next time .

Here’s my overall rating.  4/5 Stars – Great Software, almost Perfect.