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One of the things that motivated us to publish our report on video support in email was the recent surge in vendors claiming they've developed a reliable way to display video in email. I was intrigued. Do they know something we don't? Is there some kind of technical loophole they've discovered? Along with my own tests, I had a closer look at the claims of each vendor hoping to find a new technique that actually worked.

While I did come across a number of firms who specialized in video email, it turned out that a lot of them were actually agencies that offered video production services to go along with email campaigns. In most cases this was for a landing page or mini site, and not the actual embedding of video in an email per say. I did come across a number of providers making some rather big claims about video emails. Here's what I've managed to find out so far.

Clipstream

Clipstream have developed a standalone media player and encoder using Java. Their software encodes any movie file and allows you to embed it into a page via a Java applet. Admittedly, they are upfront about the fact that many email clients will prevent the video email from playing. Unfortunately, our testing indicated that Java applet support is almost non existent across the board so it's probably not the best option at this stage.

Goodmail Certified Video

Goodmail is a paid email certification provider that can provide its customers with 100% inbox delivery for ISP's such as Yahoo! and AOL. At the Email Insider Summit in December of last year, Goodmail announced their Certified Video service to launch some time in 2009 that will support streaming video support at all partner ISP's. At this stage this is the only publicly available information, and no details have been provided on the technical side. We'll continue to update this as we learn more, but because of Goodmail's pricing and stringent entry requirements, it's potentially only a real option for enterprise senders.

VHD Technology

VHD originally grabbed my attention through a post by Chad White on the very cool Retail Email Blog. Chad highlighted a recent campaign using VHD technology for Sears which they claimed used true embedded video. I was intrigued and decided to have a closer look at exactly how they did it.

It didn't take long before the shine started to fade, and it appeared that VHD was using nothing more than animated GIFs. What made this even more disappointing was the fact that VHD's CTO Duane Seon continued to publicly claim that this wasn't the case, and it was "true video streaming". I've given the VHD team a number of opportunities to prove me wrong here, but I'm still yet to receive a reply. I'd love them to chime in with a comment if they have anything to add.

Clippermail

- Form broken, waiting for reply to email

5. Vismail

Signed up to trial, waiting for account to be set up. Hopeless app, nothing works.