The most striking change on the web in the last few years is the increased usage of video. According to Nielsen, in March of 2005, approximately 55% of internet users had broadband or high speed access in their homes. Compare that to November of 2009 where that percentage had grown to over 90% in the United States. At work, the percentage of users with high speed internet access is over 98%! The fear of using video due to the negative experience of having to wait for it to download is gone.

At the same time, the costs of getting involved in entry level video production have decreased. I recently purchased a high definition video recorder for approximately $160 at Best Buy and while it won’t win you any production awards, it will allow you to communicate with your audience in a new way.

As someone who loves new gadgets, I am a frequent visitor to CNET. Check out this review of the Kodak Zi8. Along with the old style review in text form, they provide an additional review of this video camera using video, and it is front and center on the page. CNET has always had their short “Good, Bad, and Bottom Line” reviews to help those of us without the attention span to read the more lengthy review at the bottom, but the video versions are even more appealing. The Kodak Zi8, at about $180 is good enough to make a video of this quality.

Here at Silverscape, we created a microsite for Vestmark’s careers section. The video conveys the company culture better than any amount of copy possibly could. You see the people and the office, all in a customized video player which is integrated into the look and feel of the microsite. Again, no particularly fancy equipment is necessary to record the footage and much of this video was taken by their own staff members.

The site Silverscape created for DRIFIRE has an entire site category devoted to videos. This section receives significant amounts of traffic and also drives people to their YouTube channel page, where some videos are lower quality and others have higher production value. Though the YouTube player has limited capabilities for customization, the colors have been changed to match those on the DRIFIRE site and YouTube allows posting video for free.

Interested in getting some video up on your site? We can help find the best route for you whether its video taken with a $160 camera and embedded through YouTube or the organization of a professional video shoot and a highly customized video player interface.

Stay tuned for a blog entry from LD later this week about the different styles of video commonly used on the web and how they can be used to achieve different goals or communicate different messages.

Source for stats: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1001/