Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Hey everyone,

I have a few questions about Video Upload and the costs associated with it. Essentially, I want to stay as "fee free" as possible, while still taking advantage of the platform functionality.

1) How many videos can be uploaded each month at no additional cost? I was told that when I hit 75, that's when the cost start. But can I go up to 75, and the 76th one will cost me?

2) If I only use 5 this month, do the unused number of videos get added to the following month's allotment?

3) If #2 is YES, do I get "credit" for the months that I haven't uploaded anything?

4) I didn't see any format restrictions in the Admin pages, but on the upload pages I see the file types .wmv, .avi, .mov, .moov, .mpg, and .mpeg are what you can Browse for. Any other ways I'm missing for different video file types?

Thanks, and yes, I'm very cheap frugal

[#2]

If you do start getting charged for them, why not just be cheap frugal and post your videos to youtube and then embed them within the forum. That way you have the videos available to be found on both system which would enhance your SEO scores, but you would not be charged for storage.

[#3]

Liquidsasquatch,

I think we all have to think about out use cases, our budgets, and the best ways to use available technology.  I think GarenT makes some good alternate suggestions.

In our case, our company has a youtube channel and a flickr account, so I can use those for video and photo sharing, which expands the social footprint, allowing comments to be attached to the videos and photos within their native platform, and allows more sharing of the content organically as view traffic comes through more venues than just our community.   Perhaps the linking helps SEO as well as GarenT suggests.

This makes sense for content that we want to include in the community, but may not be a good fit for all of our customers, so I could see the upload space being an alternative.  

Another control is obviously to limit those who have rights to upload, so that you can be more sure about the quality and value of how your 75 videos will be spent.  As far as I know, there is no cap on still images for upload.

Do you plan to actively solicit video submissions as part of a contest, or will this be a permission bestowed to more advanced users, or is their a particular end use for the videos?  Demonstration, customer promotion, etc, etc?  

Mark

[#4]

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Mark_Hopkins wrote:

Liquidsasquatch,

Do you plan to actively solicit video submissions as part of a contest, or will this be a permission bestowed to more advanced users, or is their a particular end use for the videos?  Demonstration, customer promotion, etc, etc?  

Mark

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Thanks Mark! My plan is for Employees and SuperUsers to create demos to handle common complicated support issues. Since we're a software company, our troubleshooting steps tend to be complicated, and the onscreen text is VERY important. My plan currently is to limit the upload functionality to employees, and expand that functionality to superusers only.

Thanks for the great suggestions. Does anyone know about the "rollover videos"?

[#5]

Liquidsasquatch,

Love your idea. Kind of what I'm hoping to loop into our community.

Ours has a big support base so again, getting video tutorials up will be important.

Having users submit their own is going to be key down the road but I foresee requiring mod approval.

Or, at least having a high ranking to be allowed without approval.

We'll be embedding our videos most likely.

On the subject....does anyone know the stats behind video tutorials/help ?

If it's easily found in the community can you expect members to actually view them and almost 'solve' their problems themselves?

I personally look for these on sites before calling in support. I'm a visual learner for sure.

Any success stories with this?

John