Cloudinary Blog

Doug Sillars, a digital nomad and a freelance mobile-performance expert, answers questions about video streaming and delivery, website optimization, and more.

Doug Sillars, a freelance mobile-performance expert and developer advocate, is a Google Developer Expert and the author of O’Reilly’s High Performance Android Apps. Given his extensive travels across the globe—from the UK to Siberia—with his wife, kids, and 11-year-old dog, Max, he has been referred to as a “digital nomad.” So far in 2018, Doug has spoken at more than 75 meetups and conferences!

It should come as no surprise that video use on the internet is exploding. You can see the dramatic growth of video on the average site in this SpeedCurve blog post.

With the growth in video comes greater bandwidth use, which is not only costly for your IT budget, but for your visitors as well. Beyond the expense, there is the user experience to consider. The heavier the page, the longer it will take to load, and the greater likelihood visitors will abandon your site. Page load speed is also an important factor in SEO ranking, so clearly video is something we need to take seriously and get right. Video is challenging, presenting terms still unfamiliar to developers - like codecs, bitrate and adaptive bitrate streaming. As a result, mistakes are being made in video implementation.

Lack of experience and compression knowhow can cause significant user-experience problems. For instance, on a major retail site, I recently ran into a 48 MB video-hero banner. Pulling out the video and encoding it as an H.264 MP4 reduces the size to 1.9 MB. So, despite the desire for more video content, developers have not yet caught up to best practices. How do we get the best of both worlds without creating a disaster like the one above?

Bleacher Report is a global digital destination for sports fans, creating and collaborating on content at the intersection of sports and culture. Owned by Turner, a division of Time Warner, Bleacher Report's website and social channels focus on sports culture for the next generation of fans. Bleacher Report also has a five-star mobile app and popular email newsletters, which are part of the company’s strategy for instantly delivering in-depth articles, results and video highlights personalized for users’ favorite teams, players and leagues.

Before deciding whether to watch a movie, you would likely check out its reviews and ratings on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, or Metacritic. You’re not alone. Online reviews figure prominently as a factor that influences viewers’ decisions on which movies to see. In addition, filmmakers always produce trailers to be shown as previews that showcase the highlights of their movies in the hope of stirring a buzz and anticipation for the debut.

My work demands that I stay away from my phone and mobile notifications in order to be as productive as possible each day. It’s not unusual to find me at my desk for a total 12 hours a day (I work remotely), with four hours going to browsing the internet.

The last time you scrolled through the feed on your favorite social site, chances are that some videos caught your attention, and chances are, they were playing silently.

On the other hand, what was your reaction the last time you opened a web page and a video unexpectedly began playing with sound? If you are anything like me, the first thing you did was to quickly hunt for the fastest way to pause the video, mute the sound, or close the page entirely, especially if you were in a public place at the time.

It doesn't take a genius (or a statistician) to know that video represents a significant proportion of web and mobile content these days. But did you realize that in 2017, video will account for about 75% of all internet traffic and that 55% of people watch videos online every day? In fact, 52% of marketing professionals worldwide believe that video is the content type with the best ROI, with people spending up to 2.6x more time on pages with video than on those without.

Web sites and platforms are becoming increasingly media-rich. Today, approximately 62 percent of internet traffic is made up of images, with audio and video constituting a growing percentage of the bytes.

Developers are constantly faced with challenges of building complex products every single day. And there are constraints on the time needed to build out the features of these products.

Engineering and Product managers want to beat deadlines for projects daily. CEOs want to roll out new products as fast as possible. Entrepreneurs need their MVPs like yesterday. With this in mind, what should developers do?