Web Video, Video Blogging, Video Casting, and all its iterations – Demystified
Are you thinking of adding video to your website? The benefits are obvious. Videos can add value to your website by providing real-time product demos, archived meetings, testimonials, historical events, and live broadcasts, to name a few.
So, now you’re eyeballing the 500MB digital video CD sitting on your desk and wondering how to put it on your website. Is it possible? No one can easily download a 500MB video, right? Right. (Not yet, anyway.) However, there have been quite a few advances in video compression software and most web visitors have at least a DSL connection to the internet.
Do you remember the early web video clips which were the size of postage stamps and had a runtime of about10 seconds? Thankfully, those days are gone. Now, you can compress your 500MB digital video down to about 10MB and you don’t necessarily have to buy expensive streaming server space to offer it to your web visitors.
Video Delivery Methods
There are two methods to deliver video to your website: downloading and streaming. Which method is best for your website? It depends on the size of the video file, if it’s a live broadcast, your majority audience’s internet connection (modem, DSL, cable), your anticipated video traffic and probably most importantly, your budget. Let’s look at the pros and cons of both types.
Downloading, also known as HTTP streaming, downloads a temporary file onto each visitors’ hard drive. The movie doesn’t begin playing until it is completely downloaded, however, once it starts playing, it’s easy to access to any part of the movie without waiting for it to be delivered from a server. It’s less expensive than hosting your video on a special streaming server as video files reside on the same server as your website.
Downloading is the way to go if your video is 10MB or less and you anticipate 10 people or less watching your video at exactly the same time. One of the downsides of downloading is that you can not detect your visitors’ connection speed to serve different versions of the video on the fly. The workaround is to offer a series of links on your website to different sized videos letting visitors pick the best one for their internet connection speed.
Streaming, also known as true streaming, webcasting and netcasting is delivered directly from a streaming server continuously. The biggest con to streaming your video files is that it is expensive. If you have an in-house IT staff and server, you may want to buy your own streaming server software, which starts at about $2,000.
The benefits to true streaming are that your video can handle a lot of traffic without affecting your website server, it can deliver appropriately sized videos to visitors dynamically, based on their connection speeds and you’ll have the ability to broadcast live events. Plus, videos that are streamed, play as soon as they are delivered, no need to wait until the entire video downloads to the desktop before it begins to play.
It’s important to know that unless your video draws unprecedented web traffic and crashes your server, most web visitors will not know whether a video is downloaded to a temporary file on their hard drive or streamed directly from a media server. That is because videos always display in a player (windows media, real media, quicktime or flash) and there is almost always some buffer time as the video loads. Except for live broadcasts, the user experience is the same.
What About Video Blogging and Video Casting?
So, now you may be asking yourself, Ok, I get the difference between streaming and downloading but what about video blogging or video casting – what’s that?
Video blogging, Vblogging, and Vlogging all refer to the same thing – a video that is a blog. Usually, video blogs take advantage of RSS feeds and other syndication functions, much like a text blog. And, as we all know, blogs refer to a web log, or regular journal entry online.
Rocketboom introduced many people to their first video blog experience and demonstrated the viral marketing power of video blogging. My current favorite is zefrank.com/theshow.
Video casting, vodcasting, vidcasting, vcasting and video podcasting all refer to videos which deliver true streaming content via a syndication such as RSS feeds or Atom feeds, much like blogging. And, as we all know Podcasting originally referred to audio and music thanks to Apple’s iPod, which now of course delivers video as well.
To summarize, you have two basic methods of delivering video to your web visitors: streaming and downloading. If you want to deliver live broadcasts they need to stream and then it’s a video cast. If you post a new video on a regular basis and syndicate it, it’s a video blog.
So, now you’re eyeballing the 500MB digital video CD sitting on your desk and wondering how to put it on your website. Is it possible? No one can easily download a 500MB video, right? Right. (Not yet, anyway.) However, there have been quite a few advances in video compression software and most web visitors have at least a DSL connection to the internet.
Do you remember the early web video clips which were the size of postage stamps and had a runtime of about10 seconds? Thankfully, those days are gone. Now, you can compress your 500MB digital video down to about 10MB and you don’t necessarily have to buy expensive streaming server space to offer it to your web visitors.
Video Delivery Methods
There are two methods to deliver video to your website: downloading and streaming. Which method is best for your website? It depends on the size of the video file, if it’s a live broadcast, your majority audience’s internet connection (modem, DSL, cable), your anticipated video traffic and probably most importantly, your budget. Let’s look at the pros and cons of both types.
Downloading, also known as HTTP streaming, downloads a temporary file onto each visitors’ hard drive. The movie doesn’t begin playing until it is completely downloaded, however, once it starts playing, it’s easy to access to any part of the movie without waiting for it to be delivered from a server. It’s less expensive than hosting your video on a special streaming server as video files reside on the same server as your website.
Downloading is the way to go if your video is 10MB or less and you anticipate 10 people or less watching your video at exactly the same time. One of the downsides of downloading is that you can not detect your visitors’ connection speed to serve different versions of the video on the fly. The workaround is to offer a series of links on your website to different sized videos letting visitors pick the best one for their internet connection speed.
Streaming, also known as true streaming, webcasting and netcasting is delivered directly from a streaming server continuously. The biggest con to streaming your video files is that it is expensive. If you have an in-house IT staff and server, you may want to buy your own streaming server software, which starts at about $2,000.
The benefits to true streaming are that your video can handle a lot of traffic without affecting your website server, it can deliver appropriately sized videos to visitors dynamically, based on their connection speeds and you’ll have the ability to broadcast live events. Plus, videos that are streamed, play as soon as they are delivered, no need to wait until the entire video downloads to the desktop before it begins to play.
It’s important to know that unless your video draws unprecedented web traffic and crashes your server, most web visitors will not know whether a video is downloaded to a temporary file on their hard drive or streamed directly from a media server. That is because videos always display in a player (windows media, real media, quicktime or flash) and there is almost always some buffer time as the video loads. Except for live broadcasts, the user experience is the same.
What About Video Blogging and Video Casting?
So, now you may be asking yourself, Ok, I get the difference between streaming and downloading but what about video blogging or video casting – what’s that?
Video blogging, Vblogging, and Vlogging all refer to the same thing – a video that is a blog. Usually, video blogs take advantage of RSS feeds and other syndication functions, much like a text blog. And, as we all know, blogs refer to a web log, or regular journal entry online.
Rocketboom introduced many people to their first video blog experience and demonstrated the viral marketing power of video blogging. My current favorite is zefrank.com/theshow.
Video casting, vodcasting, vidcasting, vcasting and video podcasting all refer to videos which deliver true streaming content via a syndication such as RSS feeds or Atom feeds, much like blogging. And, as we all know Podcasting originally referred to audio and music thanks to Apple’s iPod, which now of course delivers video as well.
To summarize, you have two basic methods of delivering video to your web visitors: streaming and downloading. If you want to deliver live broadcasts they need to stream and then it’s a video cast. If you post a new video on a regular basis and syndicate it, it’s a video blog.
posted by super webgirl at
11:23 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home