A good narrative is essential for an effective sales presentation. Your digital audience’s attention is your most important commodity. This audience only has so much time to spend. Images and charts can help organize the message but they aren’t enough. The best presentations show and don’t tell. While appealing to the visual learning style of an audience is always a good idea, there is a growing expectation for more than just static images. They want video. If you want to delivermore dynamic presentations with more powerful visuals, then consider integrating video into them.
CustomShow is highly tailored for embarking on a program of rich media storytelling. However, without the proper infrastructure inherent in CustomShow you’ll face questions of how to manage, store and distribute that video.
How will you reuse, recycle, and repurpose your existing video assets? How will you monetize your investments in video? How will you be sure that it will play on all sorts of devices especially when presentations will, in addition to on-site, be done via the web? With CustomShow, clients, colleagues and prospects can view your finished SlideShow from any browser or the iPad. Here’s how we at CustomShow have built a solid platform to solve the critical challenges of including video in your story.
CustomShow assures that your videos are properly encoded to support playback on your PC and iPad. The videos you submit for inclusion on your presentation slides are h.264 –encoded to MP4 Files. Additionally, your videos are encoded to several bit rates to support for Adaptive Streaming which will allow the playback device to determine the best quality video it can currently play based on bandwidth and processor utilization.
Customshow uses the Adobe Flash Media Server and a special protocol for real-time server applications called Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). This protocol serves the videos during presentations of meetings and when presentations areviewed through the Web Viewer (app.customshow.com/viewer). There are many advantages to this live streaming method over HTTP’s progressive streaming:
- CustomShow’s use of RTMP will use less bandwidth – unlike progressive streaming, we transmit only the bits that are being watched which is more efficient for bandwidth usage. Progressive streaming requires buffering or preloading of the video data to achieve smooth playback, so a lot of information is sent that may not be watched, especially if you prematurely advance on to the next slide without completing the current slide’s video viewing.
- Streaming over RTMP protocol is more secure since none of the video is cached on the client’s machine.
- The video navigation, using the controller bar, allows “seeking”, so you can move around freely and skip quickly to any point on the video. The dynamic streaming allows us to detect the viewers machine’s available bandwidth and processing power and deliver the most optimized version of the video stream. Additionally, CustomShow takes advantage of the security and content protection features of RTMPe to encrypt the video during transfer to your web viewers.
So we see that the cloud-based transcoding of your videos into MP4 files along with nearly lossless compression and multiple versions of that video for adaptive bit rates are important steps in the process of taking your video content to the web. This ensures seamless, instantaneous playback. CustomShow works with a content delivery network (CDN) to assure that your remote SlideShow viewers are geographically covered – literally physically close to the edge network that will real-time-stream the video to them. The use of edge networks lowers the transmission costs and mitigates the physics-related connection issues for your worldwide users. And to ensure bypassing of corporate traffic filtering, the live streaming protocol is encapsulated within HTTP requests using TCP port 80 and 443 which will grant you and your IT departments some sighs of relief.
In order to provide a video experience that keeps people engaged with your story, you need the infrastructure to handle everyday traffic as well as those sudden spikes when everybody in the world is bent on watching your CustomShow presentation with encapsulated video.
