Adding Video to Your Web Site

I have a great job. As a web site developer and consultant I have the opportunity to continually learn about new technology. The last 2 years have been especially exciting as the web has become more powerful and potentially easier to use.

Web 2.0 has put the power in the hands of the users. We’ve taken some clients who had never edited a web site and given them the tools and training to be “webmasters”. It is empowering. The more they learn – the more they want to learn.  Lately we’ve been hearing a lot of, “How hard would it be to add video to my web site?”

My answer is, “adding video to a web site is pretty easy, creating the video is the hard part”.  Let’s assume that you’ve created a great new video. I will outline a few options to get it on your site.

The big question is, “where do you want to store your video?” The old answer was to upload it your web site.  Todays answer is often to upload it to an online video sharing site such as YouTube. There are many advantages for use a free services.

Cost: Disk Space: 1 or 2 videos can easily take up more space than the rest of an average web site. If you create many videos or a few large videos you could quickly run out of space with your web host.

Bandwidth: Popular videos will use a lot of bandwidth. You may quick need more bandwidth. The free services offer sufficient server space and plenty of bandwidth.

Traffic: Good: If you simply ad a video to your web site all of your sites visitors can view the video. Even better: The video sites have built in audiences of people who tune in to watch videos. Your video is now in a much larger arena.

Accessible: To make your videos accessible to the most people it is best to embed the movies in flash. Sure geeks know how to do this, but if you are not (yet) a geek the video sites do this and the encoding for you.
Stress-less: If you store your videos on your own web site space you need to be mindful of your traffic and disk space or you may potentially bring your whole web site/eMail down.

Ouch. You can pay for more space/bandwidth, but with the video sites, they handle the traffic and the space for you.

The trade off: In the digital world (as in the real world) Free is not normally free. There are a few costs involved. These sites have their own branded video players that include their logo on your video. You have no control over what other videos are viewed with yours. Note: You do control what is on your own site, but when your are the videos sites they can show whatever they want along side your video.

YouTube alternatives: YouTube certainly has the most content out there, it is the big dog.  Unfortunately much of it is not what I would call family friendly. They don’t have a way to filter their videos. There are alternatives.  Vimeo.com offers a family friendly service. The draw back for that is “who ever heard of Vimeo!?”

There are many sites to consider for sharing your video. Here are just a few: blip.tv, Google Video, MySpace, Veoh, Vimeo, Yahoo Video.

Which one do I recommend?

Business owners might be interested in blip.tv. They have good statistics and it is high customizable.

For personal use you might consider Vimeo this family friendly choice won’t make you worry when you share your videos with friends and family.

Too many choices? Enter TubeMogul, a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

Adding to your web site

Each of these video sharing sites will give you a snippet of code that you can (in theory) copy and paste into your site. I recommend adding code vs. just linking to the video site. You’ve invested some resources to getting visitors to your site. Don’t send them away too quickly. If you have any questions, ask your web host or web master. This is really the easiest part of video process.

Now you are ready! Take your best videos and start sharing.

God Bless,
Oscar Myre IV

Valley Bugler Co-Publisher Oscar Myre IV is not only our geek he is also the creative director for omOriginals. www.omOriginals.com