Increasingly, companies large and small, across all industries are enhancing their customer and brand experiences through video. We’ve just launched our dynamic video platform and shared our thoughts on the differences between traditional online video platforms (OVPs) and dynamic ones when it comes to creating, managing, and delivering compelling and engaging videos.

Online video platforms (OVPs) first launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a similar promise to the once-iconic automobile brand: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. However, as OVPs evolved, partly to address our insatiable appetite for video, they became more and more complex. Tools for every step of the video-delivery process—from ingestion to storage to encoding, and so forth—came with their own set of shiny knobs and dials. Configurations and procedures for even trivial tasks required a study of user manuals, causing disenchantment, stress, and aversion all around. Cloudinary is excited to be launching new, game-changing video-management capabilities today to tackle that challenge.

Among the image formats available today, Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) works for both static and animated images. A popular use of GIF images—commonly called GIFs—is to repeatedly loop motions, which you cannot in real life. Many people have turned themselves into online celebrities through effective application of GIFs.

According to Wyzowl’s The State of Video Marketing 2019 survey, 68 percent of the respondents say that they learn about new products or services by watching short videos. That’s a significant percentage! And a sizable chunk of your potential customers are many of those folks.

Video storytelling is one of the most effective means of conveying messages to your audience. It’s also a popular marketing tool because most people are automatically drawn to video. In eCommerce, if accompanied by attractive images and a compelling narrative, video storytelling uniquely connect with potential customers without fail.

Videos make websites more engaging and lively, promising audience “stickiness” and return visits. However, research studies show that slow startup or playback stalls of videos often leads to visitor loss. In fact, Akamai found that after a two-second delay, each additional second of stalling could cost you a 6-percent depletion of audience.

On social media, videos posted by users constitute a significant amount of the content appeal on those platforms. From upload to manipulation to delivery, a smooth, efficient, and effective pipeline for the posting process is mandatory to ensure consistent user sessions and their steadily increasing volume. However, building such an infrastructure is a complex, labor-intensive, and problem-prone undertaking.

If you were reading your social media or news feeds on or around June 11 this year, no doubt you came across your fair share of posts about Queen Elizabeth and her outfit-color faux pas. For her 90th birthday, she chose a solid neon green suit, and it didn't take long for Photoshop fanatics to suggest alternative designs for the Queen's green-screen threads.

Delivering videos according to the aspect ratios defined by social media for multiple devices and platforms is a growing challenge. The continuously rising volume of vertical videos and the corresponding increase in video traffic on mobile devices (now up to 57% of online videos watched) have only exacerbated the situation, with no letup in sight.
