Creating Your Own Playable FLV Web Videos for Member Sites

As explained in the previous post, while the popular video sharing sites like YouTube are excellent for public videos, if you want to host your video behind a password or pay wall, then you need to be able to create and host the flash video yourself. Here is how!

First step is to create your video. On a Mac the easiest option is to use iMovie. Export the movie using Quicktime and make sure it plays well in your video player.

iMovie

The far friendliest option would then to be able to produce FLV directly from Quicktime or Quicktime pro, but alas I haven’t found an option to do that immediately. Thankfully, as mentioned in the previous post, there is some easy to use and relatively inexpensive software available called DV Kitchen.

DV Kitchen

If you provide some FTP details it will even upload the files for you.

Now just having an FLV is no good. Even though it is a flash movie, it does not mean you can simply embed that right into your page. You need some more software to build into the page to create the fully featured player in your browser, and some embed code to bring it all together. DV Kitchen will even do this for you!

If you don’t want to go the DV kitchen route, or if you have to have all the files load from your own domains/network/hosting, then the defacto standard in FLV video playing is JW player

Simply follow the simple wizard

Put Your Video on the Web – Web Video Conversion Software Tools for Your Mac

We have covered a variety of conversion tools here at Cogniview but in this article I want to address a specific conversion challenge that I have had to solve recently. Namely, video for the web, using a Mac.

The Challenge

What I want to do is create videos on my mac that will play in a web page on the majority of computers, with low bandwidth requirements and at a high quality.

Should be easy, right? Should be, yeah.

Actually it is very easy, you just use viddler, YouTube, and so on, and they do the conversion and put it online for you.

My problem is I am wanting to create web video for a closed membership course, therefore these videos can not be accessible to the non-paying public, and often when you share a video using a service such as those, you give up some intellectual property and ownership.

Quicktime and iTunes

As you would probably guess, Mac software is very Apple Quicktime and iTunes centric when it comes to media and especially video. When anything multimedia pops up it is going to want to throw you to quicktime to convert and iTunes or Quicktime to play.

Using Quicktime Pro we can convert video from, say DV format from a video camera, into .MOV which some computers can play due to the relative popularity of the Quicktime plugin. Even better we can convert into an MPEG streaming format that is very well regarded. This produces a high quality video stream using H.264 encoding.

Unfortunately it is under half of computers who will have Quicktime pre-loaded. I can provide specific instructions and requirements for my course, but there is a better alternative available …

Flash

FLV and SWF videos can be played by nearly all browsers, and if they can’t they will quickly upgrade because of the ubiquity of YouTube and other hugely popular sites that use it. You get high quality, limited bandwidth use, and few technical issues.

The problem is it is more work for us as video creators, and you can’t just embed the video in your page, you need a flash video player. For the best quality you will want to find software that provides 2-pass encoding, most of the cheaper software only does one pass and therefore the output suffers.

If you have the money then the best way to create flash video is to go to the source – use Flash Pro and you know it will work and be high quality. Way overkill though if all you want to do is convert your movies.

After the official software there are many providers of flash video conversion tools. A highly regarded piece of software is Sorenson Squeeze. At $299 it is not cheap, but it does do 2-pass encoding to provide the best output.

Being the cheap scrooge that I am, I wasn’t going to pay three hundred bucks unless I absolutely had to. I ended up with a solution that I am trying and so far very happy with; DV Kitchen. At only $80, and with a free trial, it seems just the business. You can see a review here.

Converting FROM Flash

Before we get on to part 2 and actually converting our files for the web, I should mention doing things in the opposite direction, converting from the web to your computer or iPod.

Say you want to save a YouTube video to play on your TV, or get a video-based course but want to view the videos on your iPod rather than sit at your desk. Well you can, using a combination of a Firefox Plugin and a little utility intended for Sony PSP users.

Download helper allows you to download media from sites you visit. So if you like the YouTube video you are on, just click to grab it. While it says it performs conversion, I assume it is wonderful on the PC but it was no good for me and my Mac. This is where PSPWare comes in, just drag and drop to produce files that will play on your iPod or other media player!

Getting Your Video Online

In the next part I will show you how I convert my video and get it online. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!

WordPress CMS: Custom Fields

On a lot of my sites I use WordPress not as a blogging application but as a CMS. As I might have mentioned here before, I have worked at companies that have charged 6 figures for far less functionality in a CMS than you get completely free with WordPress, so why re-invent the wheel?

A much overlooked feature of WordPress that can add a lot of nice touches to a site is the “Custom Field” option along with custom templates.

Say you wanted to show a thumbnail photograph to go along with a blog post, but not in the article itself but alongside the headline?

Or maybe you have a site where you want to link content to a certain product, but pull in details about the product from a database or feed rather than manually type the information in over and over as product details change?

Another option might be to change the look and feel of a page away from the default, for example change the color of just that one page, or different header graphics. Sometimes people will color code so people know which section of a site they are looking at for example.

All of these can be achieved with custom fields. Custom fields are just a way that you can add a “meta” value to a page or post, that is information “about” a piece of content rather than as “part of” the content. Yes we have the option of using tags or categories, but these tend to be visible, and not as specific as we would like. Custom fields can be used to link to a product ID, ISBN number, affiliate code, or image Src without cluttering up our tag database.

In your blog post/page editing screen there is a box containing the custom field information. There is first a dropdown containing the custom fields you have used before. This might well be populated if you use any SEO based plugins. That is how the custom title, keywords and description are added to a page.

Next you have boxes where you can provide a key and a value. So your key might be “ISBN” and your value might be a particular books ISBN code.

In your template you can pull out the value belonging to a particular custom field using the following PHP code:

<?php
 $custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, "key", $single = true);
?>

You can see this in action over at my credit card site where we pull in a single card details into a page by specifying the cards ID, in this case the Blue American Express card. All the other details are pulled from a separate database, and are refreshed from the source daily.

WordPress is much more powerful than people give it credit for. Really, I would choose it over software costing tens of thousands of dollars. You just need a little lateral thinking to make it really rock.

If you know of any innovative uses of WordPress, do share in the comments …

Excel Data Mining: Measuring Customer Support Costs

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Excel Customer Data Mining

In this series we have already looked at Recency, Frequency and Monetary value as metrics for data mining and ranking your customers in Excel. RFM will tell you who the most rewarding customers are, but it will not tell you who is most-likely to be a tough customer, nor will it tell you how expensive those customers are.

To work out these additional factors, you need to record more data, and that is what I will reveal in this article.

Customer acquisition costs are familiar to any business but many companies do not track individual customers support costs and instead see customer service as an aggregated expense. This is a mistake because certain customers could be costing you more money than they bring in, meaning gaining more of these customers would actually hurt your business rather than help it. Another reason why “make it up in volume” is often a bad approach!

Depending on your systems you might be able to record support incidents either by counting “tickets”, or you might even be able to record time spent. Again, just like with the customer value, you want to use recency and frequency, although in this case high recency and frequency are “bad”!

What would you use instead of monetary value or margin? Well, in some cases you can place a cost on the total support a customer required. It’s not just a factor of time, although that is a cost worth recording, but also there may be additional expenses incurred such as travel, postage, returns, waste, custom work or additional purchases. A customer who demands you turn up at their offices hundreds of miles away with a brand new custom widget is going to be more of a financial burden than one who sends one email and receives a stock answer.

Along with customer ID, you will want to record the type of customer or the product/service the support was against. If customers have multiple products then do the exercise against customer initially but also run through another process for product or service.

Often, but not always, you will find the customers with the best RFM scores are also those who cost you least in customer support. The top 20% really are your best customers overall. Over and over the customers who pay you least are also the ones who cause you the most bother. Of course there is always the high-roller exception who is just demanding because, well, they can.

A friend around the millenium had a software product with service levels. Together we turned the business from a net loss into a hugely profitable company by first systemizing customer service, and then by removing the bottom rung of the offering entirely. We found the cheap product attracted customers who were both more likely to circumvent the copy protection, but also generated the bulk of the distractions in the form of groundless complaints, returns, support problems and bad PR.

You do not need fancy systems to keep this information. Using Excel you can record your customer service data very easily. Just make sure you record at least:

You might well have suggestions or requirements for additional data, but essentially you want to know what the problem was, the cure, how long you spent solving and who for.

Once you have your data you can see if there is a way to make these problems go away, perhaps the issue is with documentation or customer expectations rather than product quality. If the problems can’t go away entirely, you can then work on making your customer service as easy as possible, with stock responses, procedures, and other systems. Of course failing all that, you are left with dropping the product, customer (or type of customer) or raising prices.

Bottom line, without data you would only be guessing. So long as you have actionable information then you can actually make some decisions. If you are not recording support information, you had better get started!