November 11, 2007

Video: More of a Reality On Your Web Site

When you visit a web site what catches your eye? Video.

Video is one of the best ways to draw your customer's (or audience) attention and engage them for a longer period of time. There's three parts to creating your video.

Step one is doing the actual video. Using a basic video camera is just about all you need for starters.

Step two is editing the video. There's several great video options on the market including solutions from Pinnacle Ulead and Adobe

Step three is making the video available for your audience. Putting the video on a CD or DVD is one option - but that gives you limited distribution. The best option is to put the video online, and this is where a new service Fliqz comes into play.

Fliqz gives smaller businesses a low cost (free for the basic edition) way to showcase their videos online and last week released a Self Serve Video Player Creator.

Fliqz's press release reads A fully branded video player; it can be easily implemented by users of any experience level in five easy steps. The player also enables logos and watermarks to be quickly added, dynamically sized automatically and allows users to adjust the opacity of watermarks when needed. Additions can then be previewed and approved by the user immediately. A video embed code is then dynamically generated to afford almost instantaneous video application to a Web site.

Previously, users looking to create custom video players had to engage a design firm to build a flash player from the ground up, which is a lengthy and cost-prohibitive process. Players then required extensive back-end integration, and changes were both difficult and costly.

Other online video players that come to mind are from Brightcove , Magnify.net and of course YouTube.

A Fliqz spokesperson tells me that Brightcove is heavy on technical implementation and very costly, whereas Fliqz is plug and play, cost-effective for any size company�big or small. Brightcove is also a portal like YouTube, whereas that is not a focus of Fliqz. Magnify.net is in a different area then Fliqz and Brightcove as it focuses on the video/tv channel aggregator business model.

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