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 Please Welcome Rob Epple of AMC Video to iMatrimony. Rob is our first guest to introduce a new category, TechSavvy Wedding Pros. We will feature a new TechSavvy Wedding Professional the first of every month to share how they are using technology to improve the wedding world. Rob and I have had many conversations on emerging technology in video as it pertains to weddings (We also chat about cool iPhone apps). Today, Rob will share his thoughts and expertise on iPhone Friendly Videos for Flash Based Sites.
As a wedding professional, I sometimes get overwhelmed with the mass of email, marketing, and production related tasks that accrue on a daily basis. While keeping an eye out for useful utilities and applications, I recently ran across a gem on the Internet that bridges a gap for our many iPhone users. Enter, Episodic.com – a new site offering a FREE service that allows iPhones to play videos from certain sites that previously could only be viewed using flash based players.
Now this doesn’t seem all too exciting – I mean, iPhones already let people watch videos right? Well, partially they do, but several popular social networking sites like Vimeo.com and thousands of other blogs that pull in (embed) content from other servers use flash based players to show videos and of course, the iPhone currently does not support anything flash.
What does that mean? Well, simply put, viewers simply can’t see those videos that are embedded in blogs or other sites like Vimeo from their iPhones. And in today’s age of quick info at a glance, it’s extremely important to have your content as fast to access as possible – especially for videographers in the wedding business. So, for providers like Episodic and hopefully more to come, this service offers relief to content providers like videographers, hosting sites like Vimeo, and more importantly, for the potential brides and grooms and all the other viewers that are browsing our sites.
How does Episodic’s service work? Currently they are accepting a limited trial run of vendors to test out their service by simply setting up a free account and filling in some basic information. Here’s how:
Step One: Visit their registration page at http://iphoneapp.episodic.com/users/new and set up free account.
Step Two: Copy and paste your video feed to the Episodic form and pick your site url.
Step Three: Sit back and relax – you are done!
After some time, we received an email that told us at least 5 of our previous videos have been posted and anything new that shows up in the Vimeo feed automatically gets pulled into the new iPhone friendly site (via episodic).
From a content provider point of view, this is a lifesaver – no additional uploading, no transcoding issues, no changing of formats, and no more maintenance. Once set up, Episodic just pulls in anything that get posted into your host through the rss feed you provided. So the next time you upload a video, it is posted to the feed and then Episodic makes a new iPhone friendly version for you automatically!
So how do our brides and grooms and other viewers access those iPhone friendly videos? Well, that’s really up to the content providers. Planners and other bloggers should have an iPhone friendly blog where you can post links to you iPhone friendly videos or slideshows. For example, here is our iPhone friendly blog: http://amcvideo.com and on that site, we added an iPhone friendly link in this post to test out our new phone friendly video from Episodic http://amcvideoblog.com/?p=2545
This is pretty simple to use since all we have to do is to add a link to the iPhone videos in any post that we publish in our blog.
Another example of getting your video content to your readers is to include the phone friendly video link in your taglines, e-mail signatures, Tweets, Facebook profiles, or anywhere else you think a viewer might have a chance to see your content. For example, we can just e-mail someone a direct link to our iPhone video of choice from the Episodic site: http://cdn.episodic.com/iphone/videos/0007/3590/video.m4v
So that’s all for now – be sure to check out Episodic.com for more information on their new iPhone friendly video service – a means to get your readers, potential customers, and other viewers quick and efficient to access to your videos hosted on flash based sites. Hopefully in the future we will see much tighter integration of this methodology into more plug-ins, blogs, and of course into our own websites. As for my top item on the iPhone wish list – let’s get them working with flash based sites as soon as possible!
For more information on video hosting websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_websites
For more information on Episodic:
http://www.episodic.com
Rob is the Co-owner and Director of AMC Video Productions, LLC – a wedding video production company in Southwest Florida.
AMC Video Productions / Rob Epple
4502 SW 3Rd
Cape Coral, Florida
(239) 541-7716
http://amcvideo.com
admin@amcvideo.com
twitter: amcvideo
iPhone friendly blog: http://amcvideoblog.com/news/blog/
© 2009, iMatrimony Wedding Technology Blog. All rights reserved.
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