EZWebPlayer Takes Aim at Small Businesses at Streaming Media West.
"Being a small businessperson myself, I realized that putting video on the Internet for a small business was difficult," said Clint Pollock, president of EZWebPlayer. Pollock was being interviewed on the red carpet at the recent Streaming Media West show in Los Angeles. His solution was to create a company that offers unlimited transcoding, storage, and bandwidth for $15 per month.
Many small businesses turn to YouTube as a video host, an option that should only be used for marketing, said Pollock, not as a site's only video source. The problem is that YouTube players carry branding and offer links to other people's videos when the main video has finished.
"YouTube is going to display related videos when the video is done playing, but they're not your videos," Pollock stated.
Paid video hosting options often start at $50 per month or more, which Pollock knows is too high for many small companies.
Pollock's company offers non-branded players and keeps the price reasonable for standard definition video hosting and playback. It uses Amazon Cloudfront services as a backend, so that small businesses can enjoy the same reliability as enterprises.
To keep his service simple and affordable, Pollock shuns advanced features that matter more to enterprise customers. He doesn't offer adaptive bitrate streaming, for example.
"Why worry about all these features that small businesses really don't need?" Pollock asked.
Exhibiting at Streaming Media West, Pollock said he spent most of his time explaining to attendees that, yes, $15 per month unlimited service is possible. They don't believe it at first, he said.
Advanced features in EZWebPlayer include detailed analytics that let content owner know how much of their videos are being watched and when people tune out, ratings that display to the content owner and not to the public, easy sitemaps to improve search engine rankings, and a WordPress plug-in. Pollock is also proud of his seven-days-a-week email support. He's now planning a service that automatically pushes videos to a user's YouTube channel. Not bad for a small company.
"We're really trying to help them with simple ways to get more out of that content than they would have with just YouTube," Pollock said.
To view the entire interview, scroll down.
These Streaming Media Red Carpet Interviews are sponsored by Front Porch Digital.
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