In case you’re wondering how videos work on your site, here’s the lowdown on how we do it.
Creating your video
It’s so easy to make videos today. You can do it from your phone, tablet, or PC. Just use the camera on your phone or tablet, convert to video, starting shooting, and then upload it.
You can create your video using fancy software like Camtasia, too. You can also convert webinar recordings into videos. So there’s no shortage of ways to get video for your business.
File Type
Pretty much any file type will work. The most common type of video file that we see is MP4. When you send us a video, we’ll likely ask you to upload it to your YouTube channel, and when we create a video for you, we’ll upload it to your YouTube channel as well.
YouTube supports these file types when uploading a video: MOV (Apple), MPEG4, MP4, AVI (Windows), WMV (Windows), MPEGPS, FLV (Flash), 3GPP, and WebM. A lot of video software will convert your video into some of these formats if your video originates in another file type.
Streaming
Once your video is on YouTube, we can then link to it on your site. We’ll need the link in YouTube to view the video. Then we’ll grab the embed code and put it on your website. We can also do thumbnails, turn on closed captions, stop the advertising at the end, control the display size, and more.
The video stays on YouTube and is played using YouTube servers. Your website simply has code that links to it. So your website resides on a different server than the video and this is preferable. Website require short bursty bandwidth and videos require streaming bandwidth, so that’s why we do what we do and two different servers are involved.
Video platforms
While YouTube is the most common video platform, there are other options. We started using Vimeo for our course videos. And Wistia is sort of the premium option. So you could upload your videos to these platforms and we could link to them if you prefer. There is typically a cost for these premium platforms while YouTube is free.
SEO
Videos are great for SEO, so we highly encourage you to send us videos you create so we can embed them on your site. Once you’ve uploaded them, just send us the link to the video you want posted and tell us what page you want it on.