Whether you wish to promote your business, or as YouTube says “Broadcast Yourself,” video content beats text adverts hands down. First, the viewer gets to see the merits of your products and services instead of being told about them. Second, videos say more in less time so it's more convenient to the people you want to advertise your business or yourself, too.



Obstacles to Video Advertising through the Net

There are obstacles, however, to maximizing the benefits of video content. The large file size of video content is incompatible with the typically limited bandwidth that visitors to your site have. The inability of the author to enhance visitors' viewing experience by the use of interactive video navigation controls is also a problem. Different playback standards also present a problem. Furthermore, there is difficulty integrating other data types (text, music, graphics, and other web content) with video adverts.

Flash Videos from Adobe

It is a good thing for internet marketing professionals who wish to use video content for advertising purposes that Adobe has designed a platform for delivering seamlessly integrated and universally accessible Flash Live Video (FLV) content over the internet. By using Adobe's video delivery options, you can easily put videos on your web site for your site's visitors or you can readily make video emails and deliver your advertising content to your targeted clients. Adobe has also revolutionized the video sharing industry over the net.

Flash Video Delivery Platform

As the author of the video, you can easily use this platform to advertise your business or to post video for recreational and video sharing purposes over the internet. All you need to do is to create your own video with a high quality video or web camera and microphone then capture and encode it into FLV format using Flash Professional tools.

Once you have your Flash Video ready, delivery is easy. You can embed or link your FLV file in SWF for video email delivery or for integration on your web site. However, this method of internet video delivery is optimal only for very short clips, say 5 seconds of playback time. For longer videos, there will be audio and video synchronization issues.

If you have a longer video clip, and you only expect a few people to watch it, you can deliver your FLV file through progressive downloading. This is a vast improvement over sending your video file embedded into the SWF player. You just need to embed a short preview clip of the entire video. When it is clicked, the user is connected to the Flash Communications Server and the full video is downloaded. Your viewers can play the video as it is being downloaded because FLV downloading is done by segments. There's no file size limitation and audio-video synchronization problems.

The most wonderful Flash Video delivery innovation, however, is live video streaming, where the entire video need not be downloaded so your viewers are not limited by available disk size, the video is not cached so you protect copyright of the video, you can feed viewers video as you record them to your server, and you can track traffic better using your Flash Communications Server Utilities. This is by far the fastest and most convenient means of delivering live video to the web.

Truly, with skilled video editing and producing and a reliable flash Communications server, promoting yourself, and event or your business through internet video has never been easier.