One benefit, recently making headlines, is that online video is highly searched. Evidence to that would be You Tube surpassing Yahoo!’s search engine in the rankings. While it may come to no surprise to some, others may prefer more static search results in the form of a list or summary. Being able to visualize something definitely has its benefits. Some may argue that the result of the video search surpassing a traditional engine could be as a result of the current political climate and the ability to be able to recall previously recorded events and broadcasts. Nevertheless, You Tube is the second highest search used next to its parent Google.

When deciding to go the video route, there are some important factors to take into consideration. Most of which, could be considered disadvantages. We have outlined a couple of the most important ones for you.

Bandwidth - My personal favorite for reasons that I will not go into here. If your technology infrastructure does not support it, find someone’s that does. Without understanding the burden of streaming media, many organizations make the mistake of trying to host their own content. The argument is often in regards to who owns the content. Let a service provider stream the media for you, that’s what they specialize in and they have the infrastructure to support it. Rights to the content, more often than not, are identified as remaining the clients’. If not taken into consideration, viewers, will more than likely experience some buffering problems with their user experience.

Time and Other Resources – Rendering a video on a computer takes a substantial amount of memory and can sometimes bring your workstation to its knees. If you have the benefit of a dual-core, or even a quad-core processor, you may notice less of an impact. The fact of the matter is that there are still file fragments than need to be stored in temporary memory when rendering a video. All of the file processing takes time. In some instances, we have seen dedicated machines used for rendering video for this reason. Send your graphics guy to a long lunch if you decide to borrow his box. (This, of course, depends on the size/ length of the video)

Kraak & Smaak – Squeeze me