By Eric Graham | AV Support Analyst
Technology is always evolving. Every single year, new ideas are born, something bigger and better comes around, or an adaptation of something great emerges. Before you can blink, it becomes available in our market, it falls into our laps, we adapt to them, and we unknowingly fade out older technologies. It is an ongoing cycle that never stops. DVDs are becoming a thing of the past and this is because of 3 main reasons. ONLINE STREAMING, CLOUD STORAGE, and VIDEO QUALITY.
Let’s start with ONLINE STREAMING. It used to be that watching a movie involved going to the store and buying it, or going to the video rental store and renting it for a couple days. Then local cable and satellite companies began to offer on-demand movie rentals, and online stores such as iTunes and Amazon came around to offer digital, downloadable content. Around the same time, online streaming was born and services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu emerged. Today, the original online streaming player YouTube has hit an all-time high, reaching over 4 billion people per day, with over 300 hours of video uploaded every minute! With this direction in mind, our industry has pushed away from selling as many DVDs, rental stores have gone out of business, and computer manufacturers have been starting to redesign their newest computer models WITHOUT CD/DVD DRIVES. That’s right. This means that you won’t be able to copy, burn, or even play a CD or DVD on your computer. This transition is HUGE.
Now, onto us at Ohio State. For several years, our team had been using DVDs to deliver recorded events, content, and projects to our clients. It used to make sense. Customers often shelved these DVDs for future usage, temporarily passed them along to people who were unable to attend the event, distributed them to attendees, and/or gave them to people who asked for a copy. We had clients ask us for backup copies, copies to play at their live events, and large DVD orders for mass distribution. At one point, this solution was logical, but not anymore with much better options available.
In the last 5 years, CLOUD STORAGE has become a popular concept, and has become the perfect way to deliver large video files to our clients. At Ohio State, everyone with a name.number user account has free access to BuckeyeBox, which is an OSU branded, cloud storage adaptation of Box.com. BuckeyeBox makes it easier than ever to store, collaborate, and share our files with each other electronically. Using BuckeyeBox as a video delivery method, we send you a URL link directly to your video file, or a link to a folder, if you have more than one video file.
By clicking on the link, you will be able to preview the video in a web browser, as well as download the video file directly to your computer’s local drive. Once downloaded:
- You can easily upload the file to your website and/or social media platforms.
- You can easily move the file onto a flash drive.
- You can easily upload the file to your departmental shared drive for long term storage.
- You can easily upload the file to your personal BuckeyeBox account for long term storage or sharing.
- You can forward the link onto colleagues so they can have the above options.
We quickly realized that this method makes a lot of sense. BuckeyeBox is a great tool for the university and it essentially does what DVDs used to accomplish for us. In addition, Ohio State just recently announced that everyone now has UNLIMITED STORAGE on BuckeyeBox. You can essentially have all of your files saved, backed up, and stored on BuckeyeBox, including the large video files delivered from us.
Still need some more convincing? Let’s talk about VIDEO QUALITY. Our team is always looking to deliver the best possible video quality for the events and projects we record and create. When we export the final video file, we use a variety of different file compressions (or codecs), dependent on how the video will be used. For example, if the video is being posted on social media, we would export it differently than if it were getting posted onto OneSource. The codec we use for playable DVDs takes the video quality from high definition to standard definition, literally downgrading the video quality in half. The same thing happens when clients ask us for windows media files (WMV codec). Using this codec requires a lot of video compression, sacrifices the overall video quality, which is why our department has already phased this codec out.
With that said, our team has tested and adapted to the best codecs to keep the video quality as high as possible. Our team’s default delivery format is a High Definition MP4 (H.264 codec) video file. This type has a small file size to high quality ratio and universal compatibility. It has become the industry standard because it easily plays back across different platforms without needing to install specific players or codec packages.
As technology continues to change, our goal is to be out ahead of these changes, and bring our clients along with us. We realize that changes like these take some practice, experimentation, and time to get used to, but they do ultimately make everyone’s lives easier. Video files are the future of media delivery in this industry. DVDs are merely a thing of the past.
On 1/1/2016, our department will be phasing out DVD orders and duplication.
Article Takeaways:
- Online Streaming has pushed the video industry to eliminate the need for physical media such as DVDs.
- Cloud-based storage is a great method to deliver large video files.
- OSU employees have access to BuckeyeBox, a cloud based storage solution with unlimited space.
- The video quality of video files can be MUCH higher than DVDs.
- Our default delivery format is a High Definition MP4 (H.264 codec) video file.
- On 1/1/2016, our department will be phasing out DVD orders and duplication.