Question: I am interested in having promotional videos available for download from my online newsroom. How can I set that up?
ANSWER: One of the joys of high-speed Internet access is the ability to incorporate videos into the online experience. From a PR perspective, the Net is the perfect
avenue for delivering promotional videos and VNRs to various audiences.
If you are the type of person who shucks all responsibility for high-tech design, this article is not for you. But if you are the digital-D.I.Y. PR professional who enjoys the
high-tech challenge and gets a bite out of bytes, setting up video download capabilities for an online newsroom should be a piece of HTML cake.
"The simplest approach for a non-techie or a light techie is to use an open source product such as Zope (http://www.zope.org) or Plone (http://www.plone.org)," says Cameron K. Brown, president of AMIT Consulting LLC, in Jersey City, NJ. "Both are open source content
management systems; in fact Plone is built on top of Zope and simply gives the administrator an 'out-of-the-box' usable product for managing a public or private website. Plone
requires less setup to be a usable site, though it is harder to configure than Zope if you want it to do something different than it was originally intended."
However, Brown notes these formats are designed for downloading only, not for setting up videos online for real time viewing. "Neither of these products manage media
streaming, which means that if you want to stream your video rather than provide it for download, you will have to do a bit of work to tie the system to a streaming server," he
adds. "However, if you are happy with simply providing downloadable clips, then the basic interface will be fine."
Of course, the length of the video needs to be considered. Putting a standard short clip online is one thing, but longer videos need a bit of extra planning.
"Another potential issue would be with file size," continues Brown. "Video files can become rather large, which presents two problems with using either Zope or Plone in this
context. The first problem is with the upload process itself. Here you may experience a browser time-out if the file is simply too large, and/or you may hit a limitation in
either the transfer capacity of the Zope HTTP server which is at the core of both products, or you may run into a file size limit in the Zope Database (ZDB). Mostly, these types
of problems would only occur with very large files, but then, video tends to be very large. In the case of the latter (files are too large for the ZBD), you can always configure
Zope to use the local file system for file storage - in this case, Zope should still work the same in the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) for the casual user and should be
accessible to a Plone instance as well."
And for those adventurous PR techies who want to incorporate video announcements into their RSS feeds, fear not. "There are RSS add-ons for both Zope and Plone as well," adds
Brown.
However, if you have no clue what we're talking about, do yourself a favor - call the IT guys and share the article with them!
Contact: Cameron K. Brown, [email protected].