Streaming Video

Adding video to your church website has never been easier. You see, streaming video is not the easiest thing to "serve up" on end-user machines (that is, the people who are surfing on your website). I won't go into the details of:

• Having the content encoded correctly
• Uploading your content via FTP
• Adding a page to your website and then using the HTML editor to add a bunch of code no one really understands
• Dealing with various end users who have older computers or don't have correct settings
• A seemingly endless sea of support questions

By now you are probably familiar with the name of YouTube. Well, I am about to introduce you to two new names that I have just come across. And they are even better, in my opinion. Vimeo and Viddler are your new friends, because they allow you to have much higher video quality and, even more importantly, you are not limited to YouTube's 10-minute-video-or-less limitation.

Once you have uploaded your video to any one of these providers, check out this video help file on how to add a YouTube video to your website.

• http://www.youtube.com – Limited by having to keep clips under 10 minutes and video quality.
• http://www.vimeo.com – Limited by 500MB / week, very high quality video, very cool.
• http://www.viddler.com – Limited by 500MB / video, higher quality video than YouTube.