By Maran Perianen

The advent of technology has opened up new horizon for video publishers. Today they do not have to conform to the old ways of looking up for a TV station to distribute their content. Availability of online platform such as YouTube, Vimeo, Blip TV, Metacafe and many more had provided an alternative distribution for alternative video publishers. Corresponding cost of publishing and maintaining your content can be really inexpensive. You don't really need to have a massive start capital as well as high-tech equipment or gadget to achieve this.

Most of these platforms are free and few platform requires a very minimal amount for high resolution videos.It used to be a huge tug-of-war to get an audience with a paltry internet connection which buffers anytime of the day. However with customizable video players with informative, high-quality content can also make sure visitors stay on your site once they are there. Retaining visitors also can be achieved via inviting partners to sharing groups, share media, build and share widget as well as generating API’s to draw content for your site and vice versa.

Exposure to your videos can also be achieved via Stumble, Digg, Grapevine, which rely on the social networking spectrum of online activity.

Having built a slick strategy to bring traffic to your videos, you need to consider having a top quality streaming videos. You would never want a scenario where your video does not play when you have an audience.

In order to generate top quality streaming video, you need adhere to 5 cardinal rules;

• Motion in the video such as pans, tilts and zooms needs to be reduced. Inter-frame compression algorithms used in most streaming compression technologies does not work well with too much of motion within the video. You might end up getting a video, which lags, jerks or sometime it stops at particular scene.

• Compression algorithms used in video publishing platform creates a visible degradation in form of pixilation. It's better to understand and know the target bit rate of your end product. If the target quality is 480X360, which is relatively, will be played in a small monitor, then a bit rate of 400 Kps to 450 Kps will be sufficient. The playback will be smoother and pixelation will be less.

• Codec consideration is of paramount importance. There are many codec available such DiVX, Cinepak, H.264, Flash 7 or FLV. Depending on your platform you can scale down to the best codec for your video. Windows Media tends to produce more pixelation against H.264, which produce fairly a good amount of picture, and reduces noise.

• The backdrop of your scene also plays an important role because codec responds coherently. Codec tends to optimize the background as much as your subject. So be aware of the light you use, whether it is a backlight, key light or natural light.

• Finally, the camera settings. Way before rolling the camera, you need to decide on the compression you going to use. Some codec doesn't work well with particular compression. For instance if you shooting on DV PAL 25 fps then you need to use particular codec which will not produce lags or sluggish in the video.

Once this rules is followed then you had saved massive amount of time that you going to waste deciding which codec and compression you will be using for publishing online.

Happy Publishing!

For more information on codec and compression please go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs