As discussed in this SpeedCurve blog post, video use on the Internet over the past decade has been exploding.
Accompanying that growth is additional bandwidth, which is burdensome for your IT budget and for your visitors. Beyond the expense, you must also consider user experience. The heavier the page, the longer it takes to load, and the greater the likelihood that visitors will abandon your site. Plus, page-load speed is an important factor in SEO ranking.
Over the life of a mobile device, the cost of a cellular data plan often exceeds that of the device itself. To optimize data usage and purge useless data on their mobile devices, users can enable Data Saver from Android 7.0 (API level 24). To do so, users toggle Data Saver in quick settings under the Notification shade or under Settings > Data usage. With Data Saver enabled, apps that aren't whitelisted cannot use cellular data in the background. They are also directed to consume less data while active.
At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals. Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for all your image and video needs, including upload, storage, administration, manipulation, optimization and dynamic delivery.
TL;DR
We live in a visual world, often while on the go, and consumers expect media-rich web content. Accordingly, the loading speed of images and videos is a big factor in user experience. To optimize customer satisfaction with mobile content, you must focus on the quality, format, and size of your digital assets. With Cloudinary, optimization is simple, not only enhancing your mobile web and app performance but also upping your SEO game and boosting customer satisfaction.
Zapier is an automation tool that connects web apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and others, over 1,300 in total. With Zapier, you can connect multiple apps to automate tasks without coding or relying on your development team to build the integration. You can also automate data moves among your web apps, freeing you up to focus on other tasks.
Cloudinary has recently added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. The App demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart.
Part 1 of this series discusses the optimal way of delivering progressive video streams by taking advantage of modern, efficient codecs. That approach is ideal for short-form (under 60 seconds) videos and for videos displayed at a low resolution, such as ads and previews. But what if you're delivering longer videos with a higher resolution? No matter that you could offer them as a single file through progressive streaming, your viewers might still run into issues, such as buffering, slow start of playbacks, or even playback failures.
In my communications role here at Cloudinary, I get to speak to a lot of experts across a variety of subject matter areas, technology and not, about what it takes to connect to today’s consumer. The power of images and other forms of digital content is often at the center of these conversations given our focus at Cloudinary. And as a hobbyist and professional photographer for more than 20 years, I care deeply about images and their role in creating authentic connections and engagement.
Images and videos are critical for ensuring user engagement on the web. For instance, on a retail website, images of a product from different angles or a 360-degree video of the product can lead to higher conversion rates. For a news website, users are more likely to read articles with visual media accompanying the content. It has been reported that posts that include images produce a 650-percent higher user-engagement rate than text-only posts.