TubeMogul recently introduced a new feature called InPlay that enables some fairly powerful analytics to your self-hosted video. It’s just a little bit of code that, once wrapped around your video, allows you to track a surprisingly deep amount of viewer data and usage patterns. The number of players currently supported is a bit small (it’s still very new), but the service shows a lot of promise for mid-sized businesses that prefer the control of hosting their own content but don’t prefer the price tag often associated with self-hosted video analytics.

One of the more interesting features is “Attention Span:”

Understand how long your audience is engaged with your content on an aggregated basis across all of your videos. See what percentage of users are viewing for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, and so on. You can customize the time frame analyzed to determine how your videos are holding your audience’s attention over time.

Some very cool potential exists to compare this feature with web analytics to see not only how effective your videos are, but which (and in what volume) prospective customers prefer video to traditional content. For small and medium businesses with very finite resources, this could eventually be the tool you need to see exactly how effective web video can be in your sales pipeline.