Video Takes Over the Web

Today, the web has become one of the most common platforms for personal socializing and marketing products and services throughout the world. With more bandwidth, now available for almost the price of peanuts, it has become very easy to put up content in the form of audio, video and images as compared to plain text. As the web began to take off and technology improved, people were able to use and utilize more interactive forms of media via the web.

Because of this, one of the most effective advertising and communicative media- web videos, have taken the place of TV commercials, life experiences and short movies!
Websites like Youtube.com and the likes, have capitalized on this phenomenon and have rooted themselves firmly in to the world of videos, which are taking over the web.

With various playback technologies now supported by the web, it has now become easier than every to incorporate videos on any website, hosted on any platform. The cost of putting up videos on the web is all dependent on the purpose and goal of the web videos.

Many large and small brands alike, have realized the potential of websites like youtube.com, and are releasing videos on the web, for their marketing campaigns. Individuals too, utilize and release web videos over the web. Some videos released over the web, are about sharing life experiences, some are about personal interviews, some for dating and so on.

Videos have taken over the web like a storm and their popularity is ever growing and ever increasing. So much so that, today major search engines like Google and Yahoo are working on web video search algorithms. The popularity of videos over the internet has soared to new heights especially with the advent of web video blogs, particularly since the sole purpose of web blogs, in general, is to facilitate the sharing of information, be it personal or commercial, with one’s self and others.

Web videos have another, ulterior advantage as compared to other web media like images, sounds and animation; that being the power to grab attention of all individuals efficiently, since the average attention span of an average Joe or Jane is extremely short and plenty of other options are available. Since, web videos are efficient and more to the point, many prefer to watch rather than read or listen. Web videos also offer extremely high entertainment value, engaging potential readers and customers alike, and the same time they are competent in portraying what one may want others to know, be it life experiences or marketing bottom-lines.

Thus web videos are not only the best and most efficient marketing tools on the web today, but also the best way to communicate and stay in touch with family and friends, express one’s feelings or give personal interviews. The ease of use, entertainment value and attention grabbing ability of web videos coupled up with the fact that they are easy to make/record, upload and share, is video has taken over the web.

How to Put Video on your Website: Processing and Uploading

It's time to start using video files on your webpages. It will help you rank well in search engines and will enhance the quality of your website's usability. By far the most time consuming and difficult factor, when you want to put video on your website, is the process of digitizing the video. Let's talk about some key concepts for processing video files before uploading them to your server.

First you need to find a high quality video to process. The higher the quality the better. Consider the size of the movie. Don't go for a full screen with best resolution. You don't want your website's visitors wait for ages before the video is ready to be viewed. Look for small, clear images that will still look good with compression.

Processing the video requires specific software and some editing skills but anyone can learn some basic editing procedures. There are expensive sophisticated software packages for video editing like Adobe Premiere or AfterEffects. Ok, Premiere is by far the most professional editing tool out there but it's among the most expensive tools too. (Look at my bio for a much cheaper quality software).

The above software packages will let you do whatever you want with the video files. Add several clips, slice them, insert static images, use filters and transitions, sync up audio files are some of the features that these packages offer.

Now let's talk about an element that is neglected by many people who use video on their websites. This element is sound. It's better to edit the sound of your video separately using an audio editing software. This way you can have a better idea of what people will actually hear when they watch your video file. Poor sound quality will definitely affect the quality of your video.

After processing your video file and paying special attention to your video's sound quality you need to take a final step before putting the video file on your website. And that final step is compression. Again, what you need is a video compression software that will let you balance the image and sound quality along with some other quality and size parameters.

And now the easiest part. Uploading your video on your web server. Make sure you have enough disk space on your server. Also make sure you are allowed to use enough bandwidth because video files are real bandwidth consumers. For example let's say you have a 1 mb video file. You will only need 200 visitors to exceed a 200 mb bandwidth limit!