How long is your patience for videos that take a long time to download? Don’t you just hate it when someone has a video for you to download, and then they send you to a link where the download file is 800MB large? I personally hate this… the least that the website owner could do is offer some form of automatic player that’s embedded on their site.
If you ever decide to put a video up on your website, don’t upload a large video file. For example, video files such as “MP4”, “AVI”, and “WMV” produce very large video sizes. If you can convert them into a smaller format such as flash, you’ll see a huge increase in visitor retention easily.
I know that this is true, because you can take a look at avefrom YouTube, and all of the other YouTube “knockoff” sites that try to imitate their business model. People return to YouTube day after day to get an instant fix of their favorite video, or new information that they find helpful and entertaining.
If you look closely, YouTube doesn’t offer tubidy them the ability to download an individual video. You can browse to another similar video easily with the click of a button. No downloading needed. The only thing that they offer is the ability to embed the video onto your website or blog – with the embedded code that is on the video itself.
And the same apply to other video marketing sites. The top ones focus more on uploading flash video because it’s a fast and easy way for files to decrease – without sacrificing quality. Plus, they load faster for the viewer who is looking at the video. This is a win-win situation for everybody here.
I just noticed that I didn’t include a definition or description for what “flash video” really is. Flash video means that a “SWF” or “FLV” file has been uploaded online, and it decreases the size of the original large video file – which thus causes the video to load fast. And just because the video file size decreased, it doesn’t mean that the quality will suffer.
When I do my conversions to flash format, and upload them online… it’s a much smoother process than dealing with large 500MB video files. I like to use a program called Camstudio to convert my videos to SWF. And then from there, I’d upload them to my site and to my video blog.
There are special instances where your visitors or customers will want to download a 300MB file. They will probably download a few of these videos of this size, to burn on a DVD, and create a DVD disc that can play in their DVD player. Aside from this, if this isn’t a part of your main business model… just offer flash. It’s much easier, simpler, smaller, and fun to deal with.
Flash is something that you will definitely want to jump on and start using it as soon as possible. Leave the bulky video files alone, and go with the easier route.