Beyond You Tube

Beyond YouTube

by

Contrast Design

In our last post, we looked at the way recent developments have enabled your customers to access movies and TV-type content online. This week, we\’ll look at putting your corporate videos onto the \’net.

Online video can be very simple. The hardware which allows your computer to play DVDs also enables it to encode raw camera footage into web-ready formats. Place your video file onto an open-access site like YouTube, and that killer sequence of your kitten attacking a ball of string is playing to a worldwide audience. Now, there\’s more to YouTube

than cute kittens — in fact, we showcase our own work on it! But it\’s still true that the average YouTube movie is a one-take affair with fluffed lines, toddlers wandering into shot, traffic noise and so on. YouTube\’s interface ensures that your audience will get to see plenty of these alongside your slickly-produced opus. All things considered, it might be a better idea to serve your corporate videos from your own site.

But self-hosting opens up a number of cans of worms. Firstly, you have to be sure that your hosting arrangement will cope with increased traffic. (Talk to your network guys.) Secondly, you need to think about how to integrate the new video material. Will you put that video of the chairman\’s speech on a separate \’downloads\’ page? Or in place of the former transcript? Or in addition to it? Issues like these will affect the organization of your entire site, perhaps changing it utterly. Lots to think about? I\’ve saved the most awkward topic until last. How will you present the video material? It\’s usual for a corporate site to offer the user some control over online video, not just setting it to play automatically when the page loads. How will you provide that control? And how much of it will you allow? Well, we at Contrast have a preferred solution. It\’s called Flash Video. Flash was developed in the 90s as a means of adding interactivity to websites. Users with the Flash plug-in could see animations responding in complex ways to their input. Flash rapidly became an industry standard, favoured by the BBC, YouTube and Yahoo!, among others. In 2002, Flash developers figured out how to embed live action material, and interactive online video was born. A simple embedded Flash Video movie might play when it\’s clicked. More complex movies integrate video footage with animations, and provide elaborate controls to move between the two. A long-term user wants to skip the soft-focus opening sequence and the case studies in order to jump straight to the installation guidelines? No problem! We\’re a full-feature video production company with a lot of online experience, and our favourite jobs are the ones where we help you figure how best to deploy our live and animated footage throughout your website. Take a look through our portfolio

and give us a ring.

If you prefer to experiment before making a big leap, you might like to read this earlier post on video calling cards

www.contrastdesign.co.uk

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ArticleRich.com