Thursday, October 22, 2009

Best practices for producing and distributing video on the Web

Say there is a company that has produced a great how-to-video on making widgets. The next thing they need to think about is how they are going to publish or distribute this video on the web. When posting videos online there are a couple of things to consider. First what is the goal of posting it? Is it to start a viral marketing campaign about a social issue or is it to provide a service on the company's website to draw more people in? And secondly, what kind of web server does the company have and how knowledgeable is the webmaster? The answers to those questions can help the company decide whether to host the video on their on server or post your video to a sharing site such as YouTube.

Benefits and concerns of a company hosting its own videos:


Hosting your own video can draw more visitors to your site, enable you to customize how everything on the page looks, and one can choose to sell ads or not. There are a few things that need to be in place before this is a viable option. First, you have to know how to work with the video files if you are going to host your own videos. The webmaster will have to encode the video into a different format to incorporate it into the website. For example a lot of videos are edited using mpeg or avi but to put them on the web in an easily usable form they need to be in Flash (by Adobe) or Quicktime (by Apple). Most web videos are streamed using Flash. The second thing to consider is can I afford the bandwidth? Video files are large and require a lot of bandwidth to host.

Search Engine Optimizations tips:


Limit each page to one video, allow the URL to be specific to a video, place all videos in a central folder/directory, use an embedded player in the page instead of a popup, use text on the page to describe the video, use tags and meta tags to help search engines, submit the video to Google sitemaps to help speed up the indexing of the video for search, and allow users to share the video with friends by providing the url or providing social networking links.

Benefits and concerns of a company posting videos:


Unlike a hosted solution that requires video conversion, the posted solution takes care of converting the video files, and they pay for the bandwidth. Also, most of these sites, like YouTube, MetaCafe, or GoogleVideo, have a good reputation and a large user base that is constantly watching videos and sharing the videos with friends. This is a great solution for any type of viral marketing campaign. Popular YouTube videos are tied into universal search (incorporated into Google "web search", people don't have to be specifically searching for videos to be shown videos on that topic ) in Google which is a great way to publicize a video. Going with a posted solution however, you lose the full customization over the look of the page and whether ads are shown. In most video sharing sites, ads are displayed. Some ads maybe images or text but some maybe videos that play before your video is shown. In some cases this could be an ad for a competitor.

Search Engine Optimization tips:


Post your website URL in the description of the video, create your own account/channel/brand to allow people to follow all of your videos and any future updates, use your url in a watermark in the video because these might be copied and posted elsewhere (it is viral), allow comments and ratings to generate user excitement and discussion, and use tubemogul.com to upload the video to all major sharing sites and see analytics on those videos. TubeMogul looks like a very powerful tool for businesses or individuals to track videos all over the web.



Information from ReelSEO

Thursday, October 1, 2009

SaaS

Software as a Service is a solution for businesses to use a hosted solution for their software needs instead of running local copies of similar software. This allows the company to focus on core business and let another company focus on what they do best - software and IT management. With typical software the vendor sells the product and then it is up to the customer to manage the installs and update the product. With SaaS all of that is taken care of on the vendor side since the software is hosted and run off of their servers. When the client logs in they will automatically get the latest version. The original player in this field and one of the largest is saleforce.com. They are a CRM provider.

There is a free service called ajaxWindows that is a java and javascript based web application that functions and feels like a virtual OS. It looks very similar to Microsoft windows and allows users to fully customize their desktop. It is integrated with google docs as well as zoho. These web applications open inside of ajaxWindows which all works inside of the browser. It really does make the browser a platform. It does not matter if you are on a windows or mac computer.

Google docs is a wonderful set of web applications. I have used it many times to collaborate with team mates on trivial to complex group projects. It makes it easy to collaborate and it keeps a full record of each edit to the document. On one document we had nearly 1000 versions and it was easy to view and revert to any of them.

One of the biggest drawbacks to SaaS for most people is their worry about reliability. Since the service is hosted the client is completely reliant on their internet connection as well as the server health of the host, both of which the client has no control over. Google has tried to tackle this problem with their gears software which allows some offline functionality of web applications. It keeps a local copy of any changes and then when the internet connection is restored a sync is performed.

Hulu.com

I have been using hulu since it was in beta back in 2007. It is a great service. I hardly ever watch regular tv anymore because I can watch what I want when I want on hulu and it is free! The commercials are also much shorter than what is on tv. One of my favorite shows, The Office, is on Thursday nights during our class time so I am able to watch it the next day on Hulu.
Hulu must have some big server farms. For one, all of their videos are flash videos. I am not sure what format they recieve the videos in from the networks but I would venture to say that it is not flash. They must have a lot of CPU power to convert the videos to flash. They also require a lot of bandwidth. Almost all of their videos are available in 480p which streams at 1000kbs. They also have a few videos in 720p such as Dr. Horribles Sing Along - although I do not see it on their site at the moment. They may have removed their HD gallery completely since it requires a stream of 3500kbs. I see mentions of it but can not find it on the site anymore.
Hulu is only available in the US. They use an IP blocker to filter out requests from outside of the US. I believe this is an attempt to limit bandwidth and it also gives their advertisers a smaller target audience. The content providers probably want it to stay in the US for copyright purposes as well.

Cappuccino

In class Thursday we split into groups and researched different rich internet languages/frameworks. Some groups had the big names ones like flash and silverlight but the problem with those is not everyone can run those applications. Flash player and silverlight are free downloads but it is an extra hassle for most people and for other they don't know how to install it. My group researched a new technology called Cappuccino. It is a framework that allows the programmer to write code in objective-j (based on objective-c) and when it is compiled it is translated into html, javascript, and css to produce a web application based on web standards that anyone can run in a standards browser.
This is a great solution because almost anyone can run the application and it is fast since it uses client side javascript. The script is executed on the client machine so there is usually very little to no interaction with the server once the application is running (depending on the type of application). This also comes at a price. Since javascript in on the client machine the user can view the script. Even though the program is written in objective-j someone could steal the javascript code and make modifications or host their own version of the program. There might be some way around this but I am not sure.