Video as a Business Tool Part 1
There are many methods that your company uses to communicate. Most companies utilize the medium of print to communicate. Whether it’s brochures, business cards or print advertising.
Using video as a means of communication allows you to utilize a whole new dimension of sound and movement that will impact the visual impression your company makes.
Ok – so granted, video is a powerful sales and marketing tool. How do I, as a business owner or marketing director use this tool?
The first thing you need to ask yourself when producing a video is – “who is my audience”?
That holds true for all presentations. If you show a video promoting convalescent home services to a 15 year old who spends most of his free time skateboarding – I’d say you have the wrong audience! (unless he has a bad fall!)
That’s an extreme example but what I’m saying is – just keep in mind who your target audience is when you plan your video in order for it to have the maximum impact on your audience.
Now we can look at the different options available for video delivery.
We can start by breaking it down by these basic categories:
Internet Delivery
Disc Delivery
Event Projection
Digital Signage (and Video Kiosks)
There can be and usually is overlap from one area to another. For example, a company that produces a promotional video for their website might also have the same video put on DVD for mailings to prospective customers or donors.
Let’s take a closer look at these delivery methods and give examples of when and how they would be used.
Internet Delivery
So much has changed and continues to change concerning video on the Internet that it’s almost a full time job to keep up with the current trends.
If your main objective is to “get the video out there” and the quality of compression is not a deal breaker for you, then you might want to check out YouTube (just remember to read the user agreements beforehand carefully to make sure that you agree and also there is a limit on the length of the video as well.)
There are other video hosting sites that are free and have better quality compression than YouTube. Just do your homework first to make sure that it will work for you.
While we’re on the topic of compression – what is compression?
Compression is well…what it sounds like. It means as far as video goes, encoding the digital video to a special efficient format to enable the video to be played on the web or on a DVD.
When you record (digital) video, either on tape or on some type of hard drive or flash media- (unless you are recording on some ultra high end system that most people do not have access to) it is recorded in some type of compression. For the last 10 years+ we had the DV format which was had a compression albeit a gentle compression (getting rid of information to make it easier to store and edit).
now when you import an hour of DV it takes up about 13 gigabytes. When you take that same hour of video and put it on a DVD, it needs to fit onto a 4.7 gigabyte disk, so obviously it needs to be compressed somewhat.
So no matter what kind of delivery you have in mind there is almost always some type of compression going on.
The most common compression codecs today used on the web is flash, .wmv (windows media), (QuickTime) h.264,
May 15th, 2010 at 6:59 am
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