We work with a number of clients that rely heavily on video in marketing efforts, and during the early 2000’s rendering those videos online had been cumbersome process. We were basically stuck with Flash as one of the only consistent means of providing progressive-download video across a number of platforms. And .flv files still required that the client had the plugin installed, something that was exposed by the iPhone since Apple and Adobe refused to share their toys. The tide has finally turned with advances in HTML5 and standardized video formats.
We’ve been using Vimeo with our clients for a few years now as a video hosting platform that tailors the content to the device requesting it. This means that our clients can upload a single video file to the Vimeo website which is then converted and compressed as necessary to optimize that file for display on any device, whether that’s a phone, a tablet, or a traditional web browser.
This has entirely eliminated the hassle of maintaining multiple video formats, writing device-dependent controls to web pages, or even maintaining dedicated device pages. A single embed calls the video from the Vimeo website and the content is customized as necessary. Crazy easy!
Even better, the Vimeo website comes with a whole host of additional features like the ability to overlay watermarks, an API that exposes some playback functions, security which prevents streaming to destinations other than what’s specified by the content owner, and a whole bunch more. It’s also pretty cost-effective as a large amount of storage is available on an annual basis for less than $200 (as of 2/1/2014).