FAQs

RTV offers both products and services to help photographers, entrepreneurs and real estate agents create stunning photographic and video presentations for real estate listings, business and much more. These presentations are commonly referred to as virtual tours. 

Some individuals confuse the term virtual tour as being related to panoramic photos only. Certainly our advanced tour player plays stunning HD panoramic images, but a virtual tour can be made from all forms of media including still photographs, HD videos, floor plans, voice narration, music and embedded third party content. The choice to use panoramic photography is completely up to the tour creator. In fact, we feel that a nice mix of HD still images, panoramas and video is the single best way to make an impression with prospective buyers or customers.  Virtual tours using a variety of media is often referred to as being a “Mixed Media” presentation.  Virtual tours are commonly used for real estate or businesses, but really the possibilities are only limited to the extent of your imagination. 

If you need the hardware and equipment to produce panoramic photos we provide that as well! Our high-quality precision panoramic rotators are made in the USA and guaranteed for life. We also offer professional panoramic photo stitching software and of course, our industry leading virtual tour player.

In addition to all of the virtual tour software and hardware, RTV also provides national photography services. We have a network of over 1000 insured and vetted photographers across the United States and Canada.We are a preferred vendor for several national clients such as Choice Hotels, Motel 6, Buyowner.com and more.

A scene is a full 360° spherical panorama, a full 360° cylindrical panorama, a cylindrical partial panorama that is between 90° and 359°, a still image, or a full motion video clip that is used to represent a unique location within your tour. A panoramic scene is created by taking several snapshots and processing them with our stitching software to make a panoramic virtual tour scene. A panoramic image will only count as one scene within your virtual tour. RTV allows you to publish up to 60 scenes within each of your productions as well as up to five minutes of full motion video.

RTV consists of a staff of 10 operational employees and 4 full time programmers. To learn more about our operational staff visit our About Us Page.

RTV has been in business since 1999. We have developed a proprietary Interactive Virtual Media solution from the ground up and do not rely on other vendors or technologies to keep our system current. RTV is a profitable, privately held corporation and has the largest network of virtual tour photographers in the world. Companies like Choice Hotels, American Hospice, Lazy Boy, Barnes & Noble, and many more depend on the professional photography services provided by RTV.

A Full Service Provider is a person or entity that purchases a tour builder kit from RTV for the purposes of offering virtual tour services to others for profit.

No. This is not a franchise. RTV has policies set in place for conducting business with Full Service Providers. Full Service Providers establish their own company name and identity separate from RTV. Each Full Service Provider establishes its own policies for how it conducts business with its customers and RTV allows our customers to private label our solution to match their personal brand.

Yes, we have trial version of the Fusion Tour building software that you can experience by signing up for a trial account at Free Trial Account.

Yes, RTV offers each customer a 30 day money back guarantee.

There are times that your customer might not want a tour hosted on our tour server facility out of Dallas, TX. These instances would include times when your customer wants to private label their tour or build their own custom template around their tour. In these cases we offer the ability for your customer to remote host their virtual tour so it can reside on their servers. When you remote host a tour you lose all the automatic hit stats reporting the we provide and you will also run the risk of your virtual tour not working on mobile devices should any company make a change in their system. You will have to program your own buttons around your tour as well as code it into your web page. Remote hosting will require that you have programming skills for deployment or access to a web developer. Keeping your virtual tour hosted with RTV is highly recommended.

RTV is an approved PicturePath ™ member of Move.com the operator of Realtor.com. This means that we are authorized to send virtual tours from our servers to the following websites: www.realtor.com, www.homestore.com, and www.msn.com. Move.com. The convenience cost for RTV to post links to these sites is: $2. Companies that are not an approved PicturePath™ member are unauthorized to send virtual tours to the Move.com network of sites. RTV feeds to all other major real estate portal sites free of charge.

You are free to upload your own audio narration clips, create voice narration clips through our AudioPal computer voicing service, and order professionally voiced audio through our audio partner. It is free to upload your own narration clips. Pricing for AudioPal and Professional Voicing services vary.

A DMA stands for “Designated Market Area”. This is the area in which you reside. RTV has established 1400 DMAs within the USA. Each tour builder resides within the borders of one DMA but is not limited to operations within that DMA.

It is true that you can service clients anywhere in the word but a vast majority of your business will likely take place within your local market area. RTV uses the DMA system to feed you jobs that come from our acquired national accounts and to send you virtual tour jobs that come in as leads through the RTV corporate website. RTV sends out hundreds of leads each month free of charge and also sends out thousands of jobs each year that come in as orders from our national accounts.

Yes. RTV developed the software in house and maintains a full time staff of software engineers. RTV issues updates to the software on a regular basis. RTV is currently offering users RealTour Fusion, which is our easiest version to use yet! You can test drive the software by signing up for a Free Trial Account.

No. Once we have setup a camera on the RTV Rotator the mounting position will be the same for each photographer using the same camera.

Yes. Each camera and lens combination has a unique mounting position on the rotator. You will have to work with the RTV Setup Department to find the proper mounting position for each camera and lens combination.

Yes. The Tour Management System will provide you with a list of all of your virtual tours. You will be able to run reports on your tours, delete your tours, reassign your tours from one realtor to another, add banners, logos and photos, send out virtual tour links to others and more.

Yes. RTV offers multiple viewing formats for each virtual tour including MLS / IDX compliant tours. The different formats are viewable by clicking on unique links in the Fusion System. Virtual tour features can be enabled and disabled so as to allow the Full Service Provider to setup the tour with the most features allowed while still meeting the requirements of the local MLS.

Yes. You can have both a link to school reports as well as a link to city information on each of your tours.

Yes. A link to a map of the property is automatically generated.

Yes. You can attach floor plans to your tour. The floor plans you upload to your virtual tour will be interactive by linking your panoramic, still photo, and videos scenes to your floor plans. A clickable camera icon will appear on the floor plan for each tour scene that you link to the floor plan allowing the person viewing the tour to navigate the tour from the floor plan.

Full Service Providers paste the links of their virtual tours into the websites maintained by their customers or send them directly to their clients to post. If the virtual tour is a real estate virtual tour, it will also be sent to Homes.com, Real Estate Digital, Zillow, Trulia, Hot Pads,  Back Page, Oodle, Reachoo, Trovit, Geebo, OLX, and YouTube at no additional charge.

Yes. RTV will provide you with a login to our marketing website www.RockPointeMarketing.com which is filled with business startup information, marketing materials, presentations, and training webinars. The business startup information on the marketing website will help you with everything from picking a location for your business to sales and marketing presentations. You will also find legal forms, sample tours, logos, graphics, and much more.

Yes via Byte productions our web partner

The fee to setup an RTV virtual tour site is $250 and a hosting fee of $25 per month will be applied.

Yes. RTV makes links to sample virtual tours available to virtual tour providers for use as samples on their websites.

You can brand your virtual tours to the brokerage as well as the agent. The ability to customize virtual tours with branding is the same for both Full Service Providers and In House Agents. As a Full Service Provider, you will be able to offer the same branding as a self-service customer.

RTV’s virtual tour system will work with any digital camera that is 2.0 mega pixels or more. If your particular camera is not yet in the system, we will work with you to set it up for no additional charge when we setup your account.

The tour window supports any combination of full 360° spherical panoramas, a full 360° cylindrical panoramas, a cylindrical partial panorama that is between 90° and 359°, still images, and full motion video. These are all called scenes and you are allowed up to 60 scenes per tour plus 5 minutes of full motion video. You could have 60 stills if you wanted a tour completely made up of just still shots. Or you could have 10 full 360° panoramic shots, 10 partial panoramic shots, 40 stills, and 5 minutes of full motion video making up your virtual tour production. It is entirely up to you.

If you exceed 60 scenes within a tour, an additional tour credit will be deducted from your account at the time of upload. You are not limited to 60 scenes but one tour credit will be deduced for every multiple of 60 scenes within a single virtual tour.

Yes. RTV’s Fusion player was created using a combination of Flash and HTML 5.  We recognize when users have flash and when they don’t. When a user does not support Flash, RTV will automatically serve up our dynamic gyro enabled HTML 5 viewer which will allow the user to literally pan through the scenes of the virtual tour simply by moving left or right.  It’s quite amazing. 

Yes. You can upload your own custom background colors and images as well as change the text colors of your tour windows.

If you are unable to find your virtual tour online, please use our Search feature. You will need the MLS number or tour ID to find the tour. If you still cannot find the virtual tour it may have not been published yet. Contact the RTV virtual tour provider that took your photos for more information, or contact your Real Estate agent. If you are having trouble opening or viewing a tour, please check out our Java Checker near the bottom of this page. You may not have Java support loaded.