Gaurav Pant, Chief Insights Officer of Incisiv, recently shared his outlook for the retail industry with the Cloudinary team, specifically as it relates to digital retail transformation.
You only have to be a consumer to know that digital has dramatically transformed the consumer buyer journey. It stopped being linear and location-based a long time ago. So what can retailers do to deliver the kinds of digital experiences that today’s consumers have come to expect?
It’s widely known that video is the most effective way of communicating your brand to your audience. It is also an extremely varied medium. Take a look at the existing videos in your media library, you’ll find videos with differing lengths, colors, brightness and density of content. All of these videos need to be optimized in a different way. Cloudinary’s new automatic video quality can intelligently analyze each and every video to encode it using the most optimized settings, ensuring the best trade-off between file size and visual quality, whilst also maintaining a consistent experience throughout. All you need to do is set the quality parameter to auto (q_auto in URLs) and Cloudinary will take care of the rest.
Delivering video files to users can be a much more complex undertaking than many people stop to consider. There are a large variety of video formats and codecs to choose between, and various optimization parameters for encoding the videos. Parameters such as bitrate, key-frame-interval, and frame-rate will have an effect on the visual quality and bandwidth requirements when delivering the video file. To make matters worse, there are so many potential viewing devices out there (desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, etc). Each of these devices have different browsers or apps, and they all support different formats and codecs!
Among the image formats available today, Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) works for both static and animated images. A popular use of GIF images—commonly called GIFs—is to repeatedly loop motions, which you cannot in real life. Many people have turned themselves into online celebrities through effective application of GIFs.
On social media, videos posted by users constitute a significant amount of the content appeal on those platforms. From upload to manipulation to delivery, a smooth, efficient, and effective pipeline for the posting process is mandatory to ensure consistent user sessions and their steadily increasing volume. However, building such an infrastructure is a complex, labor-intensive, and problem-prone undertaking.
If you were reading your social media or news feeds on or around June 11 this year, no doubt you came across your fair share of posts about Queen Elizabeth and her outfit-color faux pas. For her 90th birthday, she chose a solid neon green suit, and it didn't take long for Photoshop fanatics to suggest alternative designs for the Queen's green-screen threads.
Delivering videos according to the aspect ratios defined by social media for multiple devices and platforms is a growing challenge. The continuously rising volume of vertical videos and the corresponding increase in video traffic on mobile devices (now up to 57% of online videos watched) have only exacerbated the situation, with no letup in sight.
Doug Sillars, a digital nomad and a freelance mobile-performance expert, answers questions about video streaming and delivery, website optimization, and more.
Doug Sillars, a freelance mobile-performance expert and developer advocate, is a Google Developer Expert and the author of O’Reilly’s High Performance Android Apps. Given his extensive travels across the globe—from the UK to Siberia—with his wife, kids, and 11-year-old dog, Max, he has been referred to as a “digital nomad.” So far in 2018, Doug has spoken at more than 75 meetups and conferences!
Over the past several years, I've had a chance to participate in hackathons, as part of teams that developed a social payment app and helped users decide meals to cook. But it wasn't until last month that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.