I’ve utilized Youtube video on websites in an editorial capacity, such
as an interview for our local radio station or newspapers that my
employer owns. I use a simple Flip Video camera, and use QuickTime Pro
to edit out unneeded parts of the clip, and then upload to Youtube. If
I need something a little fancier, then I’ll process it through iMovie
first. Embedding Youtube into a Freeway layout at that point is quite
easy.
Utilizing Youtube to tell or enhance a story seems well within
Youtube’s terms. However, since we are part of the local radio and
newsprint media, I’m wanting to create a video area on our websites
where our advertisers could demonstrate a product. For example, a
local spa dealer has a hot tub that features a built-in waterfall and
a light show that isn’t as easily captured with just a regular photo.
Video would lend itself to show of those features. Or another example
would be a realtor showing a video presentation of a home for sale, or
a car dealer showing off a special of the week. Using Youtube for
product demonstrations, basically 30 sec. to 2 minute TV style
commercials, would be out of the scope of Youtube’s terms - obviously
they and their parent company, Google, want their ad revenue off of
the Youtube system.
Is there a simple way to roll my own video system for my Freeway
designed websites? Youtube’s simplicity and storage capacity are major
advantages. Video would start filling up my local storage allocation
on my website rather quickly. Also, there is a question of what format
to put the movies in that is readable by the most number of people.
About 90% of my visitors are Windows users, about 8% Mac users and the
rest various flavors of Linux. I would also want it so that a video
could be incorporated into any page with a simple poster frame, and
only plays if a user clicks on the video (in other words, I hate
websites where movies auto play, I’d rather click to play a movie if
the poster frame or other information interests me to watch the video)
You might want to look at some of YouTube’s competition first, before
rolling your own. Vimeo is highly regarded, for example. Maybe their
hosting terms are more agreeable. There are others, I see different
ones every day. Vimeo stands out for having much higher quality
compression.
If you really do want to build something like this, then (given your
audience) you probably want to use Flash for your delivery format, and
if you have a serious load of files to store, the cheapest place to
put them is Amazon S3.
The Freewaycast service uses S3 as its store, and QuickTime as the
delivery format (since we’re one Mac-happy family here) and the price
cannot be beat. There are gigs of files up there, accessed frequently,
and the monthly bills are in the low single digits of dollars.
If you didn’t want to go down that road (which does involve either
some engineering or some hand-work to link everything up) then the
very simplest thing to do would be to get a hosting contract at
Dreamhost. Even their cheapest accounts come with unbelievably large
data-transfer limits and raw storage. I would set up a separate
subdomain, like video.yourdomain.com and host that out of DH (get your
current host to set up the DNS so this is all transparent to the
user). Then make a separate Freeway document for each advertiser
containing their videos, and publish each one into a sub-folder, so
your URLs are nice and guessable: yourdomain.com.
The reason for the separate documents will become clear the first time
you upload a site for the second time after making some style changes
– Freeway will upload all your movies again! You don’t want to
inconvenience the users, or your other clients, by having the entire
site dark for an hour while that’s going on.
Walter
On Jul 9, 2009, at 7:56 AM, Joe Sporleder wrote:
Is there a simple way to roll my own video system for my Freeway
designed websites? Youtube’s simplicity and storage capacity are
major advantages. Video would start filling up my local storage
allocation on my website rather quickly. Also, there is a question
of what format to put the movies in that is readable by the most
number of people.
Sometime around 9/7/09 (at 09:18 -0400) Walter Lee Davis said:
You might want to look at some of YouTube’s competition first,
before rolling your own. Vimeo is highly regarded, for example.
Yes it is. Blip.TV is another good one; far more configurable than
YouTube, better quality, etc.
In fact, I just posted something there for use in a Freeway page
tomorrow. Those of you curious about my most recent panoramas (the
Arcadia stage at Glastonbury: http://www.panoramaphotographer.com/festivals/glastonbury09/ ) might
well enjoy this video: