Over the past several years, I've had a chance to participate in hackathons, as part of teams that developed a social payment app and helped users decide meals to cook. But it wasn't until last month that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.
As discussed in this SpeedCurve blog post, video use on the Internet over the past decade has been exploding.
Accompanying that growth is additional bandwidth, which is burdensome for your IT budget and for your visitors. Beyond the expense, you must also consider user experience. The heavier the page, the longer it takes to load, and the greater the likelihood that visitors will abandon your site. Plus, page-load speed is an important factor in SEO ranking.
TL;DR
We live in a visual world, often while on the go, and consumers expect media-rich web content. Accordingly, the loading speed of images and videos is a big factor in user experience. To optimize customer satisfaction with mobile content, you must focus on the quality, format, and size of your digital assets. With Cloudinary, optimization is simple, not only enhancing your mobile web and app performance but also upping your SEO game and boosting customer satisfaction.
Cloudinary has recently added the Cloudinary Demo - eCommerce App to the Google Play Store. The App demonstrates the best practices for optimal delivery of images on a storefront, including category pages, product pages, and a shopping cart.
In Part I of this series, we discussed the optimal way to deliver progressive video streams, taking advantage of modern, efficient codecs. That approach works great for short-form videos (under 20 seconds) and for videos that are displayed at a low resolution (such as ads and previews). But what if you're delivering videos that are longer than 20 seconds for a higher-resolution experience? You can certainly still deliver them as a single file (progressive streaming), but you might run into issues, such as buffering or too high a resolution.
Music videos, which comprise an important part of the video-streaming industry, are consistently the most-viewed content on streaming giants, such as YouTube and Vimeo. In exchange for free viewing, those channels serve advertisements for revenue. That business model creates a clumsy user experience, however, as a result of often-repeated ads that don't relate to the content.
Widely acclaimed as the world’s biggest sporting event, the World Cup has established itself as the most captivating tournament to look forward to across the globe. Dating back to 1930, when the first World Cup was hosted in Uruguay, it has always engendered numerous moments of excitement, not only for the participating teams but also for the countries they ably represented. Little could anyone have anticipated that a game of 22 able-bodied men running to take possession of a leather ball could become so famous.
Short-form videos are starting to pop up on the web in places never seen before--hero banners, product pages, ads, social content, and the like. This trend could be problematic because of the many formats and codecs, let alone inadequate expertise on what best to adopt for web consumption. Nowadays, most people are familiar with image formats (JPG, PNG, and so forth) but ask them what HEVC, Vorbis, and VP9 are and their eyes glaze over.
Developers are always looking for new and creative ways to deliver content that resonates with the way users feel. Often using the latest technical innovations the market has to offer such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). What better way to demonstrate innovative uses of these technology in a consumer market than capturing expressions from your users and then serving content based on that expression!
