Telco Depot adds Ooyala as its video hosting service

Building high quality video content sounds fun and easy, but when you get into the details of production hardware, editing software, and then online publishing, a simple project can become overwhelming. So when we came across a solution out there that eased one of those production aspects, we were quick to bite.

Recently we added a library of "How To" help videos to our site. We soon found that the quality of the video streamed from our web server was inferior to the video on our YouTube channel . And it should be the exact opposite!

We discovered the reason for the poor quality was our web server. To stream high quality video and audio requires a server dedicated to such a task. So we considered building a separate server. But then we found out we'll also need Adobe's media server software to handle the job. Adobe's packages cost $5000 and up. That's quite an investment to make when you're just starting out.

But it doesn't stop there. So you get a server...big whoop. Who's going to program that server and maintain it and provide real-time analytics purely on video content? To stream the video, you need a nice looking Flash player, error handlers when network issues occur, and interactive buttons to keep the user's attention.

While we here at Telco Depot are all about "Do it Yourself," sometimes you have to realize others can do it for you better, faster, and much cheaper.

Our lead engineer, Elliot Laffey came across Ooyala months ago and he was attracted to the idea immediately. In a very appealing package, Ooyala claimed to solve our headache.

The biggest concern with the video hosting company, however, was that they require a 12-month contract up front. Not only are you investing in hundreds of dollars a month, but you're also committing to a long term relationship.

After some lengthy discussion, we found in our case, that the advantages were enough to commit to the 12-month term. It is not so much that we won't have videos in 12 months. It's more like, what if we decide to take on the task of hosting the videos ourselves in 6 months?

Well, we're stuck now. Ooyala hosts our video content. And...we're very pleased with the service.

We had a great player interface online in a matter of hours. No more choppy audio for us!

In fact the quality of the video stream when played from our website is now better than YouTube's channel. Our users can even embed our videos, using our custom player, into their blogs, newsletters or their own web site--without the cumberson ads that YouTube likes to place on top of their players.

Give the embedding feature a try. Just visit our videos page, hover over the player and click the embed button. Easy!
By the way, I have a list of videos to film, but we'd love to prioritize anything you want to see. If you'd like to know how to install something, program something or fix something, simply drop us a note or better yet, pick up the phone and call us.

So we discovered that video production wasn't so easy...but it sure still is fun!