Posts Tagged ‘on-line video’
Jeff Kopang, Vice President of Marketing for ViewCast, provides a quick overview of the Niagara 2120 streaming media appliance.
If you are considering renting the Viewcast Niagara 2120 for your next webcast, web conference, live event, or pod cast, please watch this video for more information
Whats unique about Flash is that you can create a customized player that embeds in a web site and plays the. FLV (and some other formats) on the web site. There are stand along FLV players you can get for your desktop, but most people don’t have those installed because FLV isn’t the type of video file that gets downloaded to a computer. It’s main purpose in life is play through a web browser.
In the old days (about 5 years ago), the idea of Flash and Video together was silly. There was no FLV format and you had to embed the video file into a SWF, making the SWF a huge file. The video wouldn’t play until the whole SWF loaded. A lot of that changed as the FLV format became widely used. The FLV would play through a Flash Player and supported progressive downloads (meaning you can watch the video as it downloaded). Then along came Flash Media server and streaming and now the fun really started! To read more about the differences between streaming and downloading, click here.
What exactly is a Flash Player?
Using an application like Adobe Flash, you create a small application and compile it into a Shockwave File (SWF), when the SWF is embedded on the web page, it can accept commands to play media files and FLV is one of those media files. SWF players are usually very small and download quickly while the web page is loading. What’s so great about creating SWF players is that they can look and feel how you want. You can add buttons and functionality. You can add features like chat, or interactivity, advertising, social media aspects, and easily track video usage. Think about a little bowling game built into the player, as you are watching a bowling video you can play the game. All those nifty little animated advertisements you see on web sites, those are mostly Flash SWF files.
How easy is it to make a Flash Player?
Not too easy if you don’t know what you’re doing. But there are some simple, and cost effective ways to add Flash Video to your site. One of my favorites is the JW Player by LongTail Video. This player is OpenSource and free to download (for non-commercial uses). It’s one of the most popular players out there now and rightfully so. Besides being a fairly easy to use player, it supports all kinds of plug-ins and since it’s OpenSource you can create your plug-ins or skins.
Here are some of my favorite add-on’s to the JW Player:
You can see that the JW Player is very flexible. They have a great support community and will even provide tech support via email for free!
If you’re looking to add Flash Videos to your web site, there is no real reason to make a custom Flash Player. A good developer would charge you several hundred to thousands of dollars to develop a player. Instead use a pre-made one. Of course there will be times when creating your own custom and branded player is essential. When that time comes, expect to spend some money and time developing it.
In the mean time, try out JW Player or Flow Player as an inexpensive and easy to use alternative.
If you have any questions about this topic, please post them here.
Thanks,
Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)
Tips for Getting a Video Ranked for Target Keywords
Since the search engines cannot see anything in your videos, there are only a few things you can do to inform search engines of what your videos contain. The title of the video, the comments, and the meta information are all seen by the search engines so you can add target keywords to these areas to optimize your video. It’s also recommended to use a transcription service and have all of your videos transcribed. This will make it easier for people because they can read the transcript if they are too busy to watch the video and the target keywords within the transcript can be picked up by the search engines.
Putting Your Video on a Third Party Site vs. on Your Own Site
When uploading your videos to the web, you have the choice between uploading them to third party sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Meta Café and to your own website. You can also do both if you wish. If you are looking to create a viral video and want it to be seen by as many people as possible, you will be able to get the maximum number of viewers at a site like YouTube. If your primary aim is to get visitors to visit your website, you should put your video on your own website.
How to Optimize Your Video Title
A title that contains your target keywords is of course great for SEO but you’re better off using such a title only for the videos you upload to your site. This will help your site get ranked for the target keywords. If you use your target keywords in the titles of the videos you upload to third party video sites, the videos on your own site are far less likely to rank highly on the search engines because popular sites like You Tube will always end up coming first. When you upload videos to third party video sites use catchy, compelling titles to increase the chance of them becoming viral but do not use titles that contain the target keywords. Save those target keywords for video titles on your own site to attract targeted traffic and build your site’s search engine ranking.
Another factor you’ll want to consider is the length of your video. Optimal videos are always under ten minutes. People are short on time and they will turn off your video if it is too long or too boring. Make sure your video is short and sweet and remember to keep things exciting.
So there you have it. Keep these tips in mind in order to optimize the videos you create for both search engines and humans. While it’s not possible for search engines to know exactly what is in your videos, you can help them rank well by providing the search engines with information through your video titles and transcripts
You may have noticed that a large number of websites are now featuring videos, everything from music videos, to online training. News is a popular use for presenting website video. You’ve probably heard a lot about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a format designed for sharing web content like news headlines. RSS will be covered in a future article.
Did you know?
That there are so many new advancements in online video and audio in the last year, almost anyone can have their own online radio or TV talk show, radio or television station without high fees, advanced technical knowledge, and no FCC (Federal Communications Commission) intervention or regulation. Just build a website, install your audio and/or video files, advertise, and you’re in business. You can even broadcast your audio and video files through RSS feeds (we’ll explain in a moment) to websites worldwide and Joint Venture (JV) with other website owners to include your video on their websites.
Why would you want to put video and audio on your website?
There are many reasons. We are now in the 21st Century and 2009 is said to be the year of online video. Video is a premier sales tool. You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is a video with audio worth? A LOT! More than ever, people today are in a hurry and easily distracted, and even sensitively attuned to watching television many hours a day. TV is losing some of its ground to web-surfing.
Give the people what they want, video. Entertain, inform and educate them the way they are already trained for. Now it’s easier than ever to do this. Here, we are focusing on adding video / audio to your website for various purposes such as, marketing, training, V-Blogging, video sharing and etc. New technology has made it easy to add fast loading (called Streaming) video content to your website.
Until recently, between slow dial-up Internet connections and older technology, adding video wasn’t practical for general website usage. But since over 60% of individuals online now have broadband access, and the new streaming technology, audio and video files can now be viewed online with little or no buffering. Buffering means to make the video viewable to your computer (the simple explanation). Therefore, video is now a feature that can be efficiently used online. There are still size and quality limitations to consider, but the industry is making progress in this arena almost daily.
The other problem hindering website video use was its complicated installation process. It’s been very difficult for the average individual to add video files to their websites. Windows Player simplified this process but still had limitations. It played a few formats, but not the streaming .swf (Flash) files and you had to know how to install their player on your website to play the video. You needed to know html webpage code or have a program like Microsoft’s FrontPage to install the player and video on a webpage.
Now there are a few new solutions that make it easy for the average person to install video on a website without needing too much computer or webpage knowledge. If a person knows how to cut and paste a simple code into a webpage, they can ad existing video files to their site. The tutorials even teach how to do this for the absolute beginner.
The latest software is an integration of several individual modules assembled as one user friendly software package that permits anyone to convert most of the existing video formats into fast loading, high quality, and streaming website videos. This software even enables you to customize your video player, video size, and quality. There is no player or software for your website visitor to download since the player is built into your webpage and loads almost instantly.
There are many software programs available that claim it’s easy to install video on your website. Most don’t work as promised. One good suite is Camtasia, but it is complex to use and cost several hundred dollars. A good user friendly, beginners’ level, feature-rich software should cost less than $100.
Today the Internet is the fastest growing marketplace and offers global, opportunities to all, from international conglomerates to the individual person sat at the kitchen table. What though is the most effective form of communication on the information super highway? The Internet has become the place to communicate with one another and the means to search for and locate information. Video streaming brings a whole new dimension to this experience for everyone, be they business persons negotiating a deal, friends and family keeping in touch with their loved ones, or people sharing a common interest seeing one another for the first time.
For communication to be of use, it must be effective. People are expounding vast amounts of time, effort and money to communicate effectively on the Internet. Studies have shown that using video on the Internet gets people’s attention and increases the likelihood that the message will be remembered.
Humans remember:
(source: Dr. Mehrabians, Study of Communication.)
This should have a significant impact on how one uses the Internet as a means of communication. Email changed the Internet, but video is changing the World. Email has become the fastest growing form of communication. Every day billions of emails are sent and received and the number continues to grow, (even allowing for the known problems of Spam, viruses etc.) some analysts are predicting that the number of messages will ultimately grow to as many as 100 billion a day!
This may sound great, but if one remembers that to be of use communication has to be effective, clearly definite strategies will have to be developed to achieve this aim of successful communication. The three major problems that have to be considered are:
Some people have started to include pictures and images to help convey the meaning and to add impact, but that still doesn’t solve the problem! This is because we are used to ‘face to face’ communication, where the message is interpreted not only from the spoken word but also the non verbal communication. 55% of a messages meaning is derived from facial expression and 38% is derived from gestures, body language etc.
So what is the solution? People online need fully integrated video streaming facilities for their online communication and this technology is available now, ranging from Video Email, Video Instant Messaging and even live Webcasting and Streaming Web TV. Streaming Video is the online future, and now is the time to place ones self at the fore front of this next communication revolution.
You see, in order to ‘paste’ a video file onto one of your webpages, the initial job is to “translate” your raw video file into flv format (known as flash video) – this is the net’s preferred display format for videos. This unique format enables you to ’squeeze’ your videos onto a reasonable file size (so you won’t end up with ‘heavyweight’ files…) while maintaining a top quality display level.
No matter when you want to stream your own video, this distinctive format keeps your digital movies in a special mode known as ’streaming’; this means that anytime your viewers click on play they can begin viewing any of your video(s), without delays of any kind, and even better, without having to download or install anything on their pc.
Okay, so now you’re familiar with the system, and you’re probably asking yourself how to get up and running, the answer is quite simple – you’ve got to find a simple (yet professional) software solution to do that for you. This utility will have to be able to convert your initial file(s) to flv combined with an embedded movie player, so all you need to do is send the new video to your webserver, and insert a small code line onto your webpage, wherever you would like the video to be displayed, and it’s ready to go!
Now you understand that in order to stream your own video no special training is required, you need to look for a proper solution that will have you up and running with a few clicks of your mouse, it needs the capability to compress your movies to at least 10% of the original file(s), and provide you with a professional embedded flv player.
There are lots of applications and plug-ins out there to allow you to capture video streams off the Internet. It’s so easy that you may think there is no way to protect your content at all. The following with give you some advice on how to protect your videos and sleep better at night. You’re going to employ some extra services or buy some software, but if your content is valuable then it’s worth the investment
Protecting Windows Media content has been fairly easy for quite some time. You can use the Windows Media DRM suite which will attach a digital certificate to the WMV file and require an active and valid cert to be downloaded in order to watch the video. Although this system isn’t fool proof, it’s pretty strong and will stop most people dead in their tracks. Microsoft is gearing up to roll out PlayReady which will plug the holes up in WM DRM. It fully supports Silverlight in both Windows and Mac OS, and will be easy to use (so they say). Look for a full deployment of PlayReady this summer.
But how do you protect Flash videos, specifically FLV, F4V, and MP4? If you deliver your content via progressive download, then there will be little chance you can stop someone from taking that video from you with little effort. Progressive download is literally downloading the file to the end user PC. Where’s the protection?
There is no technology today to add DRM to the file itself. Although there are some services out there that will offer something like that, they typically require you to use their proprietary Flash player in order to protect the content, who wants to do that?
So that leaves us with one option, protect the delivery of the video. You may immediately think you can just stream the video using a Flash Media Server or Wowza server. Think again. Products like Replay Media Capture can snatch that stream right up. What you need to do is stream the video using a Flash Media Server using RTMPE instead of RTMP. You also need to disable RTMP from the server all together. Adobe had a security warning about this awhile back. Leaving RTMP on, allows for a back door. RTMPE will encrypt the stream during delivery makeing it very difficult to de-compile and capture.
Are we done yet? Nope, I’m just getting started… What’s to prevent someone from discovering your stream name and then embedding that in their own Flash player? You need to use SWF verification. SWF verification will will ensure that the SWF playing the video is your SWF and not someone elses. Again, you will need Flash Media Server to do this with.
Are we done now? Not quite. You’ll be delivering your SWF via HTTP to the browser, so it wouldn’t be too hard to locate that file and WGET it. Now I have your player I can play it all I want. What do you do now? Use a Token based authentication with a time expiring URL. These schemes usually use a MD5 128-Encrypted hash. What will happen is, a unique URL will be used to play the video each and every time someone visits your site. The URL will pass a token back to a secure server proving that the hash is authentic. Then an time expire value is appended to the URL that will expire that link in a matter of seconds or a minute. Nothing too long. Access to the link is the only thing expiring, not the content. So as long as the person has started watching the video with in that time frame, there is no problem even if the video is 2 hours long. If they need to re-watch it, then they visit the site again and get a new URL.
All of this sounds like a lot of hassle and expense, is there an easier way? If you deliver your videos through a CDN who uses FMS, then they probably offer all these services, you won’t have to incur any of these expenses. Try a company called Influxis, they host FMS servers and you can setup a FMS how ever you want with minimal cost.
For a higher end solution, check out WideVine. Widevine uses some proprietary technology which goes beyond what I’ve mentioned here. Widevine’s intuitive DRM management tools offer total control over the encryption, key management, distribution and consumption of digital media. Using Widevine Cypher, pre-configured policies, digital rights and encryption are applied to inbound assets, automatically registered with Widevine and the CMS, then uploaded to a destination partner network or CDN. Just know, that WideVine doesn’t come cheap!
I hope this information is useful for you. Like all security on a computer, as soon as you plug a hole, another one is dug. The goal is to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.
Thanks,
Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)