MVPdigital.com - Video on Your Web Page

Pictures on your web page are worth a 1000 words. What about 1000's of pictures! Imagine your clients being able to view your product demos whenever they want to--from your web site.. With the new technology of video on the web you simply give them your web site address, and they can be looking at your product demonstrations in a matter of seconds.

There is a multitude of formats in which to encode your video for the web. You choose your format by knowing what it is you want. Two questions you should ask yourself are, "What quality video do I want on my web page?", and "How fast do I want it to load?". The answers to these questions will help you decide which video format to use.

Streaming Real Video :

This new technology makes your video stream video instead of downloading it. It is the quickest way to see your video on the web. The selected video clip starts playing in about 5 to 30 seconds depending on your internet connection speed. The quality and size of the video display also depend on the connection speed.

QuickTime/MPEG 1 :

These are the formats you should choose if you want the best quality video. The downside is the download time. You have to click on a link and download the video first before you can watch it in a movie player. A 2-3 minute clip could take between 2-45 minutes depending on your internet connection speed. But the quality and size is excellent. A feature called "progressive downloading" works similarly to streaming in that the viewer starts playing shortly after a portion of the clip has downloaded. The rest of the clip is downloaded as the clip plays. Progressive downloading is recommened only for high bandwidth users or very short video clips.

For Streaming Real Video :

There are two ways you can serve your video with Streaming Real Video.Two questions you need to ask yourself are, "How many people do I want viewing my video at the same time?", "How much money I want to spend?". That will determine if you want to Sure Stream or video or use your web server to serve it. Sure Stream is a server that was built specifically for serving streaming Real Video. It allows multiple users to view your video clip at the same time. It's more dependable, and the quality is just a tad better on high bandwidth, and much better for 56K modem connections.

The other way is serving your video on a web server via HTTP protocol. The same language they use to serve web pages. It's less dependable as far as multiple users viewing your video at the same time, and quality is a tad less.

For QuickTime/MPEG 1 :

There is only one way to serve these formats. And that is on a web server via HTTP protocol. A viewer would have to click and download the video off the web server to view the video. It would act like a file that you download off the internet. There is no loss in quality from the encoded video to the viewer. It is dependable too.

The main idea we would like to get across is that by putting YOUR video on your web page, anyone can access it in a matter of seconds with a connection to the internet. Lets say you want to send a demo out to hundreds of perspective clients. You would have to pay for making copies, shipping and handling, and time to organize that. By putting the video on YOUR web page you could give an internet address to someone over the phone or through an email and they could be looking at your video in seconds.