Hey Evil One
I've had far more positive feedback from members since I started aggressively agumenting the downloadable video section on my site. The feeds don't seem to go over well at all. It could be just that there's not much out there in my niche, but aside from the live video, there isn't much reaction, at least nothing positive, to the feeds I'm spending so much money on every month.
With the price of downloadable clips dropping like a stone, it makes far more sense to me to spend the money I might spend expanding feeds on licensed stuff. For 500 a month, I can put up a lot of video clips.
The format depends a lot on the producer and frankly, my members don't seem to care much. I stopped using Real a long time ago due to tons of techinical problems and the fact that most producers, if they're not providing mpegs, are putting out their content in Windows Media and/or Quicktime.
If I had to choose only one format, it would be Windows Media, for the relatively small file size versus the quality of the streams now available.
I try whenever possible to offer both 56K and Broadband clips, but the majority of my members seem to be on broadband nowadays. It kinda sucks for me, though, since I don't have broadband, to upload all that video, but the difference in retention is worth the time.
I update video 2 to 3 times a week on my site now and my new tour, hopefully going in today, pushes downloads very hard. It's the first time in a tour that I've put my video page before my pics page.
If you are going to have custom video shot for your site, try to get reality or at least POV style video, that's really what the surfers want now. It's extremely expensive, but as soon as some of the traffic deals I made in Vegas start paying off, that's the direction my site is going to take.
I know that video is tough to get in your niche, probably a lot harder than in mine, but if you need some hints, ask Trevor
Edited for grammar.
Last edited by originalheather at Feb 21 2003, 03:58 PM