Web sites and platforms are becoming increasingly media-rich. Today, approximately 62 percent of internet traffic is made up of images, with audio and video constituting a growing percentage of the bytes.
Developers are constantly faced with challenges of building complex products every single day. And there are constraints on the time needed to build out the features of these products.
Engineering and Product managers want to beat deadlines for projects daily. CEOs want to roll out new products as fast as possible. Entrepreneurs need their MVPs like yesterday. With this in mind, what should developers do?
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.
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.
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.
Videos are becoming more prolific with people having the capability to capture videos with a wide variety of cameras, including smartphone cameras that are available almost everywhere. Web and mobile applications that display videos online can be faced with a challenge when the videos are created or uploaded from different devices and in various formats, and then need to be delivered in a multitude of resolutions and aspect ratios to various web browsers, laptops and all kinds of mobile devices in HTML5 web friendly video formats.