Most website owners know how important it is to consistently provide high-quality, new content to their audience, and one of the best ways to do this is by allowing website visitors to upload videos. This takes the huge burden of content creation off your shoulders and is an incredibly effective tactic for building your site. But how do you go about trying to handle and manage all these videos? Read on to find out how you can easily add video features to your website.
The most popular form of user-generated content is video, but users uploading large video files to your website will put massive pressure on your servers. And with many different users uploading many different file formats, there is no uniformity between the videos, and that can cause a lot of compatibility issues, rendering the videos completely useless.
The best solution to this problem is to use one of the online video conversion services that are currently available. But choosing which one to use can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for. Here are some tips to help you narrow down your search and hopefully help you find the best online video converter for your website and your situation.
1. A wide range of file types.
An important aspect of an online video conversion service is how many types of files it can process. It would be useless to pay for a service that only converts a limited number of video file types, as it would mean that some users would not be able to upload their videos to your website.
To avoid this problem, you should only consider paying for an online video conversion service that not only supports a large number of file types, but also looks to add new file types as soon as they become available. This way you will avoid immediate problems and at the same time be prepared for any future problems.
2. Ease of installation.
Even if you are the most tech-savvy person, you don’t want to have to constantly keep up the constant stream of videos being added to your site through the online video conversion service as it will mean you end up spending less time on the aspects of your site and instead you will have to keep up with the relentless maintenance work.
This is why you should opt for a service that is extremely easy to set up and requires as little maintenance as possible. You shouldn’t use a serve if you’ll be the one to end up doing all the leg work. Even if that means spending a bit more money than you’d like, you should choose an online video conversion service that is completely hands-free. That way, once you’ve set it up on your site, you won’t have to spend any more time on it.
3. File upload speed.
If you have a popular website, chances are a lot of people want to upload videos. This can put a lot of pressure on the servers of whatever online video conversion service you use. It will mean that the upload speed of the videos will be slow and may even cause long queues of people waiting to upload your videos.
To avoid such annoyances, you should use a service that can cope with many videos loading simultaneously. Ideally, you should use an online video conversion service that uses the Amazon Cloud system, as this allows for faster file uploads with little or no queue.
4. Compatibility.
Another major issue that arises from many different people trying to upload many different types of video files of different sizes and aspect ratios is compatibility. You want an online video conversion service that takes all videos, no matter how they differ in file type, size, etc., and then converts them to the same file format, size, and aspect ratio.
This will allow you to have consistency between all the videos on your website, and once you have established this uniformity between all the videos on your website, your users will be able to upload as many videos as they want, without ever having to worry about compatibility errors.
5. Automatic watermark logo.
With the ease with which people can steal videos from any website they choose, content providers have no way of preventing people from stealing their video content. Instead, the next best solution is to add watermarks to the videos with your own logo or website URL. This way, at least the people watching the stolen video will know the original source.
Therefore, you should look to use an online video conversion service that will automatically watermark any video uploaded to your website. It is a very simple but effective step to reduce the harm of content theft. It may not seem important to many webmasters, but if you have a site with a lot of popular videos, you don’t want someone to steal them and pass them off as their own.