Adding Streaming Video and Audio to a Website

Understanding that adding video and audio to your website takes time, effort and money is something a lot of people don’t realize when they want to impress people that visit their website. If you’re a new website owner with a product to sell, take a look at these facts about adding video and audio, and balance whether you can financially afford, and have the skills, or have time to learn them, for video and audio. Read on to learn more about it.

When you add video and audio to your website, know that if you have a lot of visitors, your bandwidth costs for it will go up. There’s the chance that if you have dramatic spikes in visitors at any time, your cost will go out of site, too. If you’re looking for a website host server, check out if they even allow streaming because some of them don’t. They just don’t have the server capacity to allow streaming and large bandwidth usage. Remember that having streaming ability at your website won’t be a cup of tea for some customers that want to find out about your product. Downloading takes time, even for a small file when you have dial up ISP services.

You’ll have to decide what type of software programs that you need for your website, too. Video and audio players take different kinds to play. Even between video players there are differences, and you’ll have to spend time either digitizing with MPEG, or settle for less quality with QuickTime software. Expense is a major issue with using MPEG software for video because you’ll have to purchase a digitizing board that starts around $5,000.00. Even if you decide to have someone else do it, it’s expensive, too.  The costs per minute range from $65.00 to $100.00 and another issue is that a lot of formats for playing back aren’t compatible with other computer systems too.

After you’ve found some video, check to see how it was filmed. The better the quality, the easier it will be for you to digitize it. Remember, the more you have to work with, the more you’ll have to digitize it to look good on your website. Stick to regular sized captures for your video and on the Internet you’ll need to use 160x120 pixels per image for good video movies online. You’ll have to edit your video, too, and there are a lot of good programs out there on the market for you to edit. With these programs you can match up video segments, and splice them together to make a neat movie. There are other software programs such as Photoshop that can be used to add interesting affects to the video, just like with pictures in Photoshop. Stretching, warping, and layering are just some of the things that you can do.

For sound, you’ll need to purchase sound editing software like Macromedia. It allows you to take out sound from files in a program like QuickTime, and clean it up by making the sound clearer. When you start to edit the sound, make sure to listen to it in a quiet setting, and use earphones so you can hear sounds clearly. Sound compression software is necessary too, so you can make the file smaller, and clear in the audio track. Most people don’t take into account that sound is just as important as video, and pay little attention to its affect in the presentation on their websites. Recognize that sound makes an impression, and can give your product the shot in the arm that it needs to make a sell.

Uploading your file should be easy, but beware that you could go over the amount of disk space that’s allotted from your ISP server, and don’t forget your bandwidth either. Extra charges will be incurred, if they’re not paid, your website will be shut down. There will need to be a link placed from your website to the file that you’ve downloaded to your server. Always tell your visitor how much time it will take to download and its file size because if you don’t, people might not click on it, and you might just loose a sale.