We’re thrilled to be sharing our enhanced WordPress Plugin for seamless image and video management with the world today. Available for free to all WordPress users here, the new plugin will help the millions of users relying on the popular CMS more easily create visual-rich websites, while cutting their content publishing times in half. You can learn more about key integration features in today’s announcement.
Want to learn how to win audiences with video? At 1:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, February 25, Cloudinary will join Playmaker, Bleacher Report’s in-house creative agency, for an Adweek webinar on improving user engagement through video. Beckley Mason, executive director of Playmaker, and Sanjay Sarathy, Cloudinary’s VP of marketing, will offer proven, real-world tips for creating and delivering dynamic, compelling video experiences to online audiences worldwide.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have the powers of Gatsby rendering performant pages and serving optimized and transformed media files from Cloudinary on the same site? That’s now a reality: I’m excited to introduce two Gatsby plugins on Cloudinary: Gatsby-Source-Cloudinary and Gatsby-Transformer-Cloudinary.
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!
Increasingly, companies large and small, across all industries are enhancing their customer and brand experiences through video. We’ve just launched our dynamic video platform and shared our thoughts on the differences between traditional online video platforms (OVPs) and dynamic ones when it comes to creating, managing, and delivering compelling and engaging videos.
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.
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.