It’s always a good idea to include an introduction video on your landing pages. Many studies have proven that pages which include video convert web traffic into customers more frequently than pages without video.
So why can’t you upload a video directly to your media gallery and include that on your web pages?
Well, there are several reasons.
Firstly, we’ve made that decision for commercial reasons. Video files take up a lot of storage space, and if we allowed everyone to upload video files, we’d have to shift to much bigger server infrastructure, which in turn means additional costs that would have to be passed on to you, the client.
Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, serving video directly from a web server is almost never a good idea, for a bunch of technical reasons.
Web servers are designed for delivering mostly static internet resources like code and images. Web servers which aren’t optimized for video deliver a poor playback experience. YouTube has servers which are specially designed to optimize video delivery through buffering and other technical enhancements. Therefore, it is almost always better to deliver video from YouTube or Video URL via a BabelTEQ Page Builder “video” module. There are actually two modules to choose from; the standard module and the advanced module. Usually you will want to pick the advanced video module.
Another reason why it’s best to leverage YouTube as a free video service is that different browsers expect video in different file formats. Some browsers will render MP4 files whereas others require video in WebM format. Which means that you would need to transcode your original video into at least a couple of different formats. It’s just easier to upload your file to YouTube and let them do the transcoding automatically.
If you want to deploy video on your pages BUT you don’t want to use YouTube or Vimeo then get in touch because we may be able to arrange (for a small fee) a third party video hosting platform which includes video delivery nodes behind the Great FireWall of China. This could be a particularly good option if you are targeting Chinese students.