Videos in web sites and apps are starting to catch up with images in terms of popularity and they are a constantly growing part of the media strategy for most organizations. This means bigger challenges for developers who need to handle these videos in their web sites and mobile apps. Cloudinary's mission is to solve all developer needs around image and video content management. In this blog post, we are excited to introduce Cloudinary's complete cloud-based video content management solution for developers.
Video is an increasingly important component for websites - whether it’s to inform visitors, enhance user experience or support sales and marketing efforts. But delivering high-quality video at large scale can be quite a challenge. You need to consider encoding, format, bandwidth usage, delivery and the devices on which visitors may be watching the video, to name just a few concerns.
Like it or not, visuals tell better stories than words. But using images and videos on a website presents challenges. This article is a follow-up to Website Image Performance Improvement, in which we discussed how to upload, store, manipulate, optimize and deliver images, efficiently and effectively. Now, let's talk video.
This article was originally posted on Scotch.io
In the early days of the web, the only thing that mattered was getting that content out to users no matter how long it took or what resources it consumed. As a matter of fact, users seemed to understand and were ready to wait till whenever their browser's loading spinner stops and the contents displayed.
The night was moist. Angular2 had just been released and developers all over the world were asking for an integrated image management solution.
Cloudinary heeded the call and is proud to present the new Angular2 SDK, providing directives for displaying and transforming images and video with an API.
Update:
In this post, we clarify that not all browsers natively support HLS or MPEG-DASH, and thus in order to deliver adaptive streaming video to all devices, you should deliver it using a video player that supports your chosen format. In December of 2017, Cloudinary released its own Video Player, which enables you to easily embed a player in your web page that can stream any HLS or MPEG-DASH video. For details, see the Video Player announcement blog post and the Video Player documentation.
Websites have evolved greatly over the past few years. Once text-heavy websites have become more eye-catching with prominent images and video. But the addition of richer media isn’t the only change impacting websites. Consumer behavior also factors into this evolution, as web access has moved from the desktop realm to a variety of different devices – smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches and TVs – with different dimensions and resolutions. And consumers want to be able to access web content anytime and from any location.
To ensure that website performance is optimized, bandwidth usage is minimized and users have a top-notch experience, we will need to address many challenges.
High resolution images and videos
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, it’s no surprise that website owners are using images and videos as powerful tools on their websites to engage visitors. High-resolution images look best, but these files are so big that they cause websites to load slowly and use excessive bandwidth. These problems frustrate visitors, and potentially decrease their incentive to engage further on the website.
Once upon a time, in long forgotten browser versions, getting a video into a website required creating and embedding Flash resources. But these days, all modern browsers support HTML5, including the HTML5 video tag, which means you’ve got a built-in video player that anyone can use.