We recently had a client ask that we support mobile platforms with the video content on their Website. They don’t have a lot, but we needed to come up with a solution that would allow us to provide the videos in multiple formats, without distracting the visitors with other information, like ads.
There are a lot of ways to share video for free; YouTube, Vimeo, and others. But when you are trying to use video for a commercial application and support mobile platforms, you need to do it yourself. If you use YouTube, you get ads. If you use Vimeo, you don’t get good mobile support.
YouTube.com – It is a great service, but if you upload videos and embed them on your web page, a visitor might get ads for a competitor on your website! Also, at the end of the video, a visitor might see videos for competitors or other products that may distract a customer from what you have to offer. On the plus side, they offer good support for mobile platforms.
Vimeo.com – With a modest subscription price, you avoid the advertising issues, but their support for mobile is lacking. While they offer mobile versions of the videos, the script for embedding video is Flash based, which will not work on most mobile devices.
HTML5 – This will be a good option going forward, but support for it right now isn’t at a level where we’re comfortable using it on production sites where some visitors are still coming in on IE 6.
We decided to come up with our own system. We created 2 versions of the videos, one Flash and one 3GP to support mobile devices. We use javascript code to detect the visitors platform and display the appropriate file. It’s a little more work on our end, but it allows us to showcase the client’s videos, without distracting the visitors.
