maybe

Apparently, cool and cutting edge does not fit the AOL business model.  They announced this month that they are exiting the user generated video market.  They say that they will still offer professionally generated video, in the wake of advances from YouTube that will not only offer TV shows, but full feature movies.

Somehow, I suspect that going back to generic for AOL may not work out too well.  You can only harvest an old business model for so long before there is nothing left to harvest.  I suspect that the only viewers they might be picking up with this new shell of a service will be the rare person that is bird watching with Nikon binoculars and just happens to scan across a computer screen playing an AOL video by mistake.

Not like its hard, they cover all these new media shows.  These guys are everywhere! 

. . .  They should be they have software that is absolutely necessary for bloggers.

So my question was simple.

Can I upload a video from Camtasia that has clickable link hotspots in the video to ScreenCast.com?

Answer, Probably so!

The internet was shaky in the show, while I was talking with them, so they couldn’t demonstrate, but it seems to have everything to do with choosing the ‘ExpressShow option’ to publish and not manually uploading files from your computer after Camtasia has automatically generated something.

So if you put together a screencast or even a video on how to strap in Britax car seats, you can edit in Camtasia and put a hotspot over the image of the car seat with a link to the company offering them.

I’ll test this for sure, when I get home, and report back here with more details  . . .

So as they provide video tools they also provide video hosting so that you can deliver your created videos on the Internet at very high quality.

Now I am cheap by nature and I don’t like to pay for things that I perceive are not necessary. I use a large section of canvas with my projector for home movies and I wouldn’t buy a speaker mount when I could just set a speaker on a shelf. 

So when it came to video for me, the obvious choice for me initially was to use free services.  You can create a video and hosted for free on YouTube, or even make a few cents posting your videos on Revver.

This week I learned a few situations where those services just won’t cut the mustard and it could actually be beneficial to pay a few dollars to host your videos.

There are two fundamental scenarios that I see right off the bat where this make sense.

1. The first scenario occurs when you absolutely must have high-quality video available for your viewers and especially when that video needs to be larger than the small boxes provided by YouTube or other free services.
2. The other scenario occurs and this is actually the way that I became a convert, when you need to include a video that has clickable items within the video. So if you want to put together a video survey, in flash, then you can create that survey in the form of a video box and run it through screen cast.com. If you want to offer a a clickable hyperlink you can even embed that link within the video so that the person can click on a certain area within the video and go to a particular website or location.

They do offer a free trial at the beginning of the service for about two months and then ask that you have to start paying for the service at rates that start at about $10 a month.

Well TubeMogule those amazing gurus that developed a way for people to upload the same video to many of the sharing services through one upload has gathered up a great deal of data crunched the numbers, paid a statistician to tell them what was what and programmed a very simple little tool that can help you predict just how many people will view your video over its life cycle.

Simply plug in the number of days since you published the video, then enter the number of views that it has already received and it will calculate the predicted number of views the same video will likely get over the entire year.

The tool is designed to predict videos that are not one offs, such as a home video of your kids playing on their new swing sets.  This is targeted more towards videos or producers that have some level of following and will likely get at least 1,000 views out of their video in a year or better.

However, these free sites all share a common problem.  They reduce the size of a video down to about 480 – 360 pixels in width.  So if you make a full screen video, they shrink it for you. 

That’s nice of them to save you the work, but when someone tries to watch a product demonstration or a video tutorial, they may want to look at the full screen version.  If you hit the full screen button with any of those services, the small video they have on file will be stretched across the screen, but it will not retain the detail you originally recorded and uploaded.

To give your visitors, readers, students, colleagues etc, that kind of detail, you need to host the video somewhere and that means paying for bandwidth.

It doesn’t cost much at all to store large files, but enabling people to look at those video files over and over again, requires bandwidth and processor power (on the server).  That is something you have to pay for.

TechSmith is a company that makes Camtasia (the leading screen capture program).  They setup a relatively cheap video hosting company for just this type of thing called Screencast.com.

Below you can see their rates which are not terribly expensive as these things go.

What is Transfer Bandwidth?

Transfer bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to viewers when they download your content from Screencast.com. You are allotted a certain amount of transfer bandwidth each month depending on the type of account you have purchased.

From within your Screencast.com account, you can view the amount of transfer bandwidth that has already been used. When you reach your account’s limit for the month, viewers will not be able to download content until the next month’s transfer bandwidth is applied to your account.

If you find that you regularly run out of transfer bandwidth, you might want to upgrade to a higher level of service. At the Premium account level, you can purchase additional blocks of transfer bandwidth and extra storage.

How to Purchase Additional Transfer Bandwidth

If you have a Premium account, you can purchase additional transfer bandwidth for your Screencast.com account. Extra transfer bandwidth can be purchased in 100 GB, 300 GB and 500 GB blocks. These additional blocks of transfer bandwidth roll over from one month to the next. Use the extra bandwidth whenever you need it, until it is gone.

 

~ Screencast.com

This service can be excellent if you do a great deal of video tutorials that required a high level of detail, but no in high definition.  This may not help someone running a DIY site trying to show people how to grout tile or install bathroom vanities, but if you want to show someone how to perform a function in excel, or on the web it can be extremely useful for just a few dollars per month.