The present-day marketing trend is the promotion of products/services through content marketing which is also known as online marketing. Lot more channels are offering this facility of online marketing. The important component of content marketing is video. Video has advantage over plain text as it can:
a) Give more information about the product than plain text.
b) Attract more viewers.
c) Provide more interaction between the user and the creator.
given this importance of video, there are many channels offering videos for education, entertainment, business as well.
Here, the marketer is at a crossroad whether to promote his content on channels available in the market or start/own his website. Whatever the option the marketer might choose, he has to ensure that his content can attract more viewers which can be proportional to the conversion (towards purchase decision by the viewer).
The option of choosing free or a self-hosted platform: As explained above, there is an option for the marketers to use the available free platforms for the promotion of their content. Alternatively, he can also promote the self-hosted platform. Given below are the pros and cons of self-hosted platform vis-a-vis free platforms.
Free Website Platforms offers advantages like:
1) Content is stored or hosted on platforms’ servers. Hence there will be no initial start-up costs.
2) They offer ease in setting up and maintain without any prior website design knowledge.
However, free platform has limitations/disadvantages such as:
1) The server name (of the platform) is tacked on to your content
2) Free websites lack professional look.
3) The marketer has less control over his blog.
4) The marketer is provided a limited amount of bandwidth, video time & also the memory space, along with advertising options. All these limit the marketer’s opportunity to earn money from his content.
Self-hosted website, on the other hand, offers the following pros & cons:
Pros:
1) Full control over the website including its layout, SEO, ad revenue and more.
2) Custom themes can be installed (for branding the website).
3) Complete access to content allows the marketers to make necessary code changes.
4) Advanced Analytics avaliable.
5) Monatization Options are more.
Cons:
1) It requires an initial investment to design the content, host the same on the website etc.
Streaming Server Requirements to Stream Video From Your Own Website
The ever-changing technology has been able to change the world of streaming dramatically. Convergence of two trends – adaptive bitrate and HTTP delivery – can be observed in many of the streaming media delivery services offered by key players like Adobe Systems Inc, Apple Inc, Microsoft, etc.
Adobe: IN addition to existing protocols like RTMP, RTMPE, Adobe has entered ABR and HTTP delivery space with product code-named Zeri. Adobe recently released its Flash Media Server in 3 different flavors i.e., FMSS (Flash media streaming server), FMIS (interactive server), FMES (enterprise server). The FMES server also uses the Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) which coupled with traditional multi-casting replicates into a multicast.
Apple:
Apple’s own OS X server has an Apache HTTP server built in.
Microsoft:
IIS (internet information services) from Microsoft sits at the delivery point of an end-to-end solution.
There are some other multi-protocol servers as well available in the market that enables the marketer to host his content on his own channel. The presence of these many companies with various offers (for delivery of ABR content), future seems to be very encouraging. The marketer has to weigh the pros and cons of the own website against the free platforms and take a final decision. The decision also involves other constraints like budget, the targeted audience, the content, and also the ability of the marketer to manage his website for promoting his content.
