We’ve all been there: you play a video that really grasps at the core of your soul, but nothing is infinite so, eventually, it ends. You’re faced with a blank screen or something equally unreassuring and your soul is propelled into an existential void, never to return to reality. Well, we have good news for you: it doesn’t have to end this way.
When designing a webpage or an email blast we’ve all been coached by the marketing gurus to include a call to action to help guide the behavior of our audience. How come we don’t do the same thing with video?
For the most part, people don’t add CTAs to video because it used to be technically difficult to pull off. Do you add an image to the end of the video? How do you make it an active link? Can you even control what happens at the end of the video (like with YouTube, where the end of the video is outside the scope of what you can customize)?
As a result, most people settle for a simple fade to black or company logo. Heck, we’ve been guilty of that practice ourselves, mostly because its the easiest thing to do. But all of us have been missing a big opportunity to help influence our audience’s next action. Where can you direct users with a call to action?
Free trial or demo: Once you’ve shown off a product in a format where the prospect is a passive viewer, why not offer them the chance to give it a try actively?
Contact a sales rep: Help your users find more information by communicating with a person now that you’ve scaled the basics of communication to a video
More resources: Guide your users to the next logical step in learning more about whatever your video is trying to teach or show them
What kind of device is your audience watching your videos on? Should you make a mobile version? Should you make an iPhone or an iPad version? What about Android? There’s no incentive for your audience to watch your video if it looks like crap or if the audio is out of sync.
When you’re serving web video, your audience is going to be on different computers, with different connections, and different capabilities. You need to deliver your content in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the message. In the end, it’s all about viewer experience. Here’s to web video that doesn’t suck.
If you’ve dealt with web video, you’ve probably dealt with a similar dilemma to our protagonist, though perhaps not for the same reasons: you want to skip to a particular frame in the video you’ve uploaded but can only seem to reach the surrounding frames. This is because you can only skip to keyframes if you’re viewing a video using the currently-omnipresent Flash plugin.
There are two main types of video compression: the first is intraframe compression, which treats each frame as an individual entity and encodes it accordingly (basically, each frame is treated as a JPG image). Because all of the data in every frame is retained, it results in large files, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use it these days. That’s where interframe compression comes in. Interframe compression takes advantage of the nature of video to use information from surrounding frames to compress the images in a video. Each keyframe in this mode of compression retains all of its information, and the subsequent frames only need to record the changes. This is great for reducing file size because it takes advantage of video as a medium — there are going to be similarities between frames, so why store these more than once? It’s more important to store the differences between frames so less information is stored redundantly.
Most video on the web right now is displayed using the Flash plugin, which only allows you to skip to keyframes. You can definitely feel the difference between this and the ability to smoothly skip to whatever frame you like in a desktop client like Quicktime or VLC, which have access to more resources in terms of memory, graphics, and CPU than a plugin does (and if you haven’t noticed it before, sorry, I may have just ruined the Internet for you). If you’re a web video buff (or even a casual follower of web video news), you’ve heard some hype about HTML5 video. One of the big advantages of HTML5 video is that it replicates this desktop software experience of being able to skip to any frame in a video, not just the keyframes, because video encoding and display is built right into the browser, which is desktop software (and consequently has access to all those precious resources). In a modern browser like Chrome, you can already see the difference. And chances are, it won’t be that long before other browsers catch up!
You’ve got a stubborn video file giving you trouble. What’s the first thing you look at when you begin to troubleshoot it? Chances are, you’re going to take a look at the file’s extension, such as .avi, .mov, .mp4, .wmv, .ogv, or others. This is the root of a lot of people’s misunderstanding of video files and one of the reasons that figuring out a video file can be so confusing: there are actually multiple formats associated with any video file, and only looking at the extension, which indicates the container format, is an oversimplification (within this container, you can find video and audio tracks that are formatted in different codecs).
The container format can be somewhat informative, and there are both problems and advantages to different container formats, but in general, the audio and video codecs used are more informative. In a way, the container format is a lot like a .zip or .rar file: it does have its own unique qualities, but mostly, it’s a package that holds other files together.
What container format should you use? It really depends a lot on your workflow and what software you’re using to export videos. As we note in our documentation on exporting video, we generally recommend .mp4 or .mov format for maximum compatibility.
With business video on the web, one of the most important priorities is deliverability–you want the majority of people (in fact, more than the majority of people) to be able to view your video without having to take any action beyond pressing “play.” The two main web technologies for playing video are Flash (which has been around for a while now) and HTML5 (which is pretty new).
Flash is a proprietary browser plug-in, built by Adobe. It was one of the first to make video on the web work, and Flash is shipped with almost all browsers (Safari on Macs now being the exception), on almost all laptops and desktops. The Flash plug-in handles all decoding of a video.
HTML5 has been the subject of plenty of buzz, especially with its super simple <video> embed code that’s unprecedentedly pretty and concise. The schism in the web video industry was deepened when the iPhone came out; it did not support Flash at all, but instead exclusively supported HTML5. With HTML5 video, decoding decisions are made at the browser level. Most Mac laptops don’t ship with Flash. For this reason, it’s a good idea to offer at least a Flash and HTML5 option for viewing web video, to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Furthermore, you want to make accessing the video seamless: users of one technology shouldn’t have to click an extra link just to view the version of the video that’s supported by their device.
Things do get more complicated than just the dichotomy between Flash and HTML5, at the encoding level, but the simple recommendation here is to keep in mind that there is no one thing that always works. Later on, Smooth Playback will cover more specifics on codecs and the internals of a particular video.
Video might just be one of the most nebulous tech topics there is. There’s plenty written on it, but it’s all so dense and spread out and convoluted that it’s very difficult to find a single good, readable guide for beginners. That’s why we’re starting this webcomic: we want to share our web video expertise, but we also want you to have fun reading it. Check back each week as I cover a new topic in Wistia’s newly minted webcomic, Smooth Playback! We’ll start with the basics (like file sizes, bitrate, resolution, codecs, and container formats) and then move on to more advanced, specific topics. We’re also curious about what you’d like to know more about, so let us know if there’s any particular knowledge that you are oh-so-eager to lap up!
