By
Jeff Czyzewski on January 10th, 2010
This topic is very fresh in my mind. I just finished spending about 15 hours putting the final touches on some videos for a new project.
I’ll admit, that most of that time was spent recording, editing and polishing the video. When all was said and done, the LAST thing I wanted to hassle with was getting everything uploaded and put inside my members area.
Come to think of it, I spent about 5 minutes getting about 15 videos online and setup within my members page. (I outline everything I did to make this happen, so don’t worry)
Video Services You Must Use and Why
One of the biggest recurring themes I hear from marketers online is that their web hosting plan has more than enough bandwidth to support video.
While that may be true, it’s not the best use of your web server or the bandwidth. That’s why I strongly recommend anyone that has video or large downloads to use a service like Amazon S3. Amazon’s S3 service is setup to serve up files and video as fast as possible AND remove the burden from your web server. And the best part is, it costs very little.
How little? Well, last month my entire bill was about $9.00 and I store gigs of videos and have tens of thousands of streaming videos playing…and my site never had a hiccup.
How to Get the Video On Amazon
So here’s a little bit of a challenge. Amazon S3 wasn’t designed for the “Non-Techie”. It was designed for developers and programmers to build applications to interact with it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it, it just means that it will take a few extra steps.
There are plenty of Desktop applications you can use to upload your files to Amazon S3. Cloud Berry Explorer is one that I’ve used for a while. It’s free (and there’s a paid version). It works much like an FTP program, but is designed specifically for Amazon.
Again, the challenge with using any of these tools is, that not only do you need to send the files to Amazon, you need to set permissions to make sure they can be used AND that they are not leached, stolen or ripped off my people who should have access to them.
How to get video on your page
If you’ve taken my advice up to this point, you now have videos uploaded to Amazon S3 and they are sitting there, waiting for you to put them on your website or blog. So now you need a video player. Again, there are plenty of freely available players.
Two of my favorites are the JW Player and the FlowPlayer. Both have free and paid versions, each with different features. Both players will allow you to play any H.264 compliant movies (which is what all of the online video services support) . To put that in basic terms, it’s what YouTube.com uses and most new movies with .mov, .flv and .mp4 are encoded with.
I won’t go into the specifics on what you need to do on your webpage to get them video embedded, because each site provides some great tutorials (and I’ll probably be putting a video together to explain this later).
Video Services You Can Use
By now, your head is probably spinning. There’s lot to do between setting up an Amazon S3 account, uploading files, setting up players and getting everything into your blog or website.
And that’s the reason why smart people have create services like EZS3.com.
EZS3 takes all of those extra steps out of the way for you by handling all of the uploads to Amazon S3, Setting Permissions and Putting all of the code together to display your video on your web site or blog. It literally takes no time at all to use this service….and plenty of the big names use this as well.
BUT…as much as I like the simplicity… I don’t like the fact that in addition to paying my hosting and paying for amazon, I have to pay another monthly service to have EZS3.com to create save me these steps. Yes… it is very handy…but there is a better solution.
By far, the best solution I’ve seen and begun using myself, is something that delivers the Best of Amazon S3, the best of the video players and the service of EZS3(without the monthly charge).
The best part about this new solution is the fact that it also has some crazy cool features that normally would require a developer to custom code for you.
What I’m talking about are automatically redirecting viewers to another web site or page after the video is playing.
OR
When the video is done, automatically showing an opt in form right inside of the video player that allows people to opt in right after they watch a video..
OR (AND THIS IS THE BEST)
Showing a Clickable Button or Add to Cart button right after the video is shown to create an amazing call to action.
Of course, to implement all of this takes a whopping 2 minutes. Honestly the longest part of the process is uploading the video to Amazon S3. Which is all automatically handled right inside of system.
So..what is this system and why is it so much better? Well, this new system is the EasyVideoPlayer.
The reason it is so much better is because you can run all of this on your own website. You upload this control panel and it takes take of Amazon Video Uploads, setting permissions, changing the look and feel of the player, redirection to other pages and it provides you the code that you cut and paste into your blogs or websites.
And once you upload this to your one website, you can use the code on any number of websites you want.
For instance, I put the Easy Video Player System on one website and use it with my one Amazon S3 account and I’m able to use it to put videos on my blogs and websites no matter where I host them or what domain they are one. I can even lock down where the videos can be played from so no one can steal the link and embed it on their site. (Of course, you can click a button and Easy Video Player will give you the ability to allow people to do that…just like you tube.
Check out this video system here…. and for a limited time, you can get a full demo of how this system works…in my opinion, this is probably one of the best marketing tools available right now.
