As regular readers to this blog (hello Mum) will know all too well, I’ve been banging-on about the importance of video within a company’s sales, support and marketing strategy for years.
Hopefully, we all know now that video is too powerful a medium to be ignored. That if a visitor clicks on a video they are more likely to watch it until its end, then read a swathe of text. That producing and distributing video has never been easier or more affordable. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Today, we’re living in what some people are calling a Post-PC age. We no longer need PCs or laptops to do most of what we used to use computers to do. Emailing, surfing the web and (of course) watching video – whether that’s dogs on skateboards on YouTube, or any of the various TV channel catch-up services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.
As I wrote in a previous article, today there are a plethora of video formats for all types of devices. Different web browsers like different types of video format, as do various smartphones, not-so-smartphones (dumbphones?), tablets – even video games consoles.
Well, I recently saw the future of online video for businesses. And it’s nothing short of amazing.
vid.ly is an online service from encoding.com that takes away all the hassle of using the right format, codec, HTML coding and the rest. Whether you’re sharing a link or embedding a video into your website, vid.ly handles it all. Simply point vid.ly to where your video is (or upload it directly) and after a few minutes you get a vid.ly shortlink as well as the HTML5 code to embed into your website.
And that’s all there is to it. From then on, whatever connects to your website vid.ly presents a version of your video in a way that the device can understand. What’s more, as new devices enter the market vid.ly will update the range of videos that it offers so that your visitors are never left staring a a blank screen. Genius.
I’ve been playing around with vid.ly for the past few days, and I have to say that it does everything that it claims to. Video quality is stunning, playback is fast and smooth, and the process of producing vid.ly videos couldn’t be easier from its well-designed web interface.
Make no mistake, what vid.ly has done here is nothing short of remarkable. Taking away the headache of format, delivery and so on with the assurance that your video will play on whatever device. That’s huge.
I’m sure that YouTube, DailyMotion and the rest are working on a vid.ly-like service (they’d be mad not to). But that’s irrelevant. The technology is finally here – and accessible to even total novices – to give online video the push that it’s needed.
And that’s great news for everyone.