Quote:
Originally Posted by Konda
No I am not.
There is absolutely no need to offer videos in any other format than h264 mp4
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From a technical perspective this is pretty accurate. When it comes to pay site owners and pay site members/customers the same logic doesn't apply.
I'll give you a real example.
We've had automatic video encoding functionality in the Elevated X CMS since 2008. That's 5 full years.
During that time, we saw things go from WMV/MPG/MOV/Flash being the formats people wanted to seeing Flash become the primary format and one of those others become the secondary, to seeing Flash/MP4 being the primary combination.
18 months ago we removed Flash from our product demo site and removed it as a default and went to just MP4. The result was a series of emails from prospective customers and existing customers asking if we supported Flash and other video formats. We realized they weren't ready for it so we then re-encoded all of our videos into better quality Flash files and added the format back into the system defaults.
We later realized if people saw the "Flash player" it didn't matter what video format it was actually playing. They were happy as long as they believed it was playing Flash even though it was playing MP4.
Elevated X is progressive when it comes to tech trends. Our CMS supports a multitude of devices with no customization needed including tablets and mobile phones. We've had detection for HTML5 capable devices and automated delivery of automatically encoded MP4 video in multiple sizes based on devide since 2010.
After all of that, people still want Flash and other formats.
If and when MP4 does become the only file people want to offer, automated video encoding will still be critital because not just 1 file, 1 size or 1 watermark is needed to deliver optimal results to all customers on all devices and platforms. This isn't going to change anytime soon.
Look at how long it took Real Media and Quicktime to drop off the list of what people felt were "required" video formats. Believe it or not we still come across pay site owners with Real Video files on their sites.