Cloudinary Blog

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!

Online video platforms (OVPs) first launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a similar promise to the once-iconic automobile brand: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. However, as OVPs evolved, partly to address our insatiable appetite for video, they became more and more complex. Tools for every step of the video-delivery process—from ingestion to storage to encoding, and so forth—came with their own set of shiny knobs and dials. Configurations and procedures for even trivial tasks required a study of user manuals, causing disenchantment, stress, and aversion all around. Cloudinary is excited to be launching new, game-changing video-management capabilities today to tackle that challenge.

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!

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.

Short-form videos—hero banners, product pages, ads, social content—are popping up on the web in places never seen before. This trend could become challenging because of the many formats and codecs, let alone inadequate expertise on what best to adopt for web consumption. Nowadays, most people are familiar with image formats (JPG, PNG, and so forth), but ask them about High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), Vorbis, and VP9, and their eyes glaze over.

Bleacher Report is a global digital destination for sports fans, creating and collaborating on content at the intersection of sports and culture. Owned by Turner, a division of Time Warner, Bleacher Report's website and social channels focus on sports culture for the next generation of fans. Bleacher Report also has a five-star mobile app and popular email newsletters, which are part of the company’s strategy for instantly delivering in-depth articles, results and video highlights personalized for users’ favorite teams, players and leagues.

My work demands that I stay away from my phone and mobile notifications in order to be as productive as possible each day. It’s not unusual to find me at my desk for a total 12 hours a day (I work remotely), with four hours going to browsing the internet.

The last time you scrolled through the feed on your favorite social site, chances are that some videos caught your attention, and chances are, they were playing silently.

On the other hand, what was your reaction the last time you opened a web page and a video unexpectedly began playing with sound? If you are anything like me, the first thing you did was to quickly hunt for the fastest way to pause the video, mute the sound, or close the page entirely, especially if you were in a public place at the time.

It doesn't take a genius (or a statistician) to know that video represents a significant proportion of web and mobile content these days. But did you realize that in 2017, video will account for about 75% of all internet traffic and that 55% of people watch videos online every day? In fact, 52% of marketing professionals worldwide believe that video is the content type with the best ROI, with people spending up to 2.6x more time on pages with video than on those without.