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Showcasing Your Corporate Video Content
Ann Roskey, VP of Marketing & Audience Development, Accela Communications
 Companies invest significant time, creative energy, and resources developing multimedia content that showcases their expertise, products, or services. The corporate Web site is the perfect place to showcase this content, but many platforms require visitors to leave a company's Web site to view a program. After all the effort and time spent to attract a visitor to a web site, sending them off to another location is a very ineffective means of establishing a relationship. In some cases, visitors are required to launch two separate windows to watch a program, which also happens to be siloed from the rest of the associated content on that site – resulting in a poor user experience.
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By contrast, programs that are embedded and displayed in multiple independent locations - within the corporate Web site, on channel partners' sites, on a publisher's site - offer increased branding control and exposure for the program. Your brand, navigational elements, and other resources that complement the topic of the program surround your program, allowing visitors to really explore the topic within the confines of your site. Embedding your program directly into yours or other sites also brings the very valuable benefit of not needing to worry about viewer pop-up blockers.
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How does embedding work? Typically, a snippet of Java HTML code will be supplied to you by your rich media service provider, which can then be added to a standard web page template. If the platform is Flash-based, the player should be able to be resized to fit into any web page dimensions. When published, the program loads directly into the web page and is served by the rich media service provider’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). This also means that the host web site does not need to be technically equipped to serve and monitor streaming media performance – that is the responsibility of the service provider. In this scenario, the impact on the web site that acts as the conduit for the program is negligible.
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Streaming media performance considerations
Rich media programs can be prone to performance issues – security protocols, a network glitch or congestion can result in poor video and audio quality. Video buffering is no longer acceptable to web-savvy viewers who watch more and more video content on a daily basis. Most rich media service providers will use a CDN, such as Akamai to deliver the best possible streaming media experience. Accela Communications happens to use a combination of our own streaming server technology and the Akamai network to take advantage of the strengths that each has to offer when determining the best route to a customer. For example, the Akamai network uses sophisticated caching techniques to move the content as close as possible to the end user. AccelaCast has a patent-pending technology that determines the best protocol for delivering multimedia to a given user, taking into consideration the network, security, or firewall protocols in place and will then identify the best data center to serve that content from. In addition, the AccelaCast player continuously monitors user bandwidth and when necessary automatically downshifts to a slower streaming speed to maintain uninterrupted viewing, without requiring the viewer to restart or wait for buffering.
Having your program produced and delivered by a rich media service provider that can monitor and manage the performance will eliminate the need for making significant investments in streaming media infrastructure and at the same time, allow you to focus on what matters most – the content!
Feedback? Questions? Contact Us. |
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