Make Money Online with Low-Cost Video Streaming and Blogging Solutions

At the beginning of this year, one of my friends told me she wanted to create video sharing platform to make money with her spare time. She asked for suggestions from me on what types of the platform should be and the profit models. I know she graduated from a famous university and has an IT degree. So, I suggested her choose the familiar subjects on IT, tech, PC or related subjects. Familiar subjects are the basics for making money.

Low-cost Streaming Video Solutions

Aiming at low-cost streaming video solutions, she decided to create a streaming video blog with WordPress at first. As we all know, it's worth spending a few extra dollars to own your content and have a real blog address like http://yourblog.com -- especially if you want to make money.

However, video blogging based on WP is just one type of low-cost video streaming solutions. There are more low-cost streaming video solutions. Some video streaming and sharing solutions can be embedded into web pages with ASP/ASP.net/PHP scripts or Joomla content management system.

Traffic and Content

To create a video sharing platform is easy, while another problem came on its heels--How to attract visitors or bring much traffic? A great deal of traffic is the premise for making money to this video sharing platform. Does the low-cost streaming video solutions can really bring the new visitors?

The answer is YES. My friend wrote some IT news, tech topics, uploaded one video per day and received about 20 visitors per day after two months. It was a frustrated result because she had prepared a lot for this streaming video blog. “Content is king” is what she always kept in mind with. She began to place more videos on this video sharing platform named “view tech world with another eyes”. These videos are about tech or IT opinions, or some cartoon guides. She chose some keywords for each video and frequently uploaded some informative videos, and finally, the traffic started to increase, about 200 visitors a day this July. This is one big step and this August she earned her first money—15 dollars for making and displaying video testimonials for a company on her blog. Though “15 dollars” is not worth mention, it gives her much courage to run video streaming sites.  

Traffic Depends on More Factors

Actually, video is not the only factor for the traffic increase, the other factors are also very important, such as the layout, the color match, user experience and the site promotion. While, what I have to mention is that video really add much to a site.

Streaming video blog is just a case of video sharing platform for personal use. Besides, you need download and install a WP-FLV plug-in to integrate videos to blog. When it comes to a group or enterprise, they may search for some functional, easy but low-cost streaming video solutions. However, no matter you run video sharing sites or streaming video blog, the methods to make money are largely identical.

Can all people who run video sharing sites make money? The answer is No. Only those video sharing platform with a great deal of traffic could bring money. It is well known that except for layout, color match and good user experience, videos need SEO and promotion to bring traffic, such as submitting the site to Google/Yahoo/Bing, submitting videos to YouTube/Dailymotion, optimizing keywords/content/anchor texts, making use of SEO tools etc.

Methods to Make Money Online With Video Streaming Sites

The traffic is the key to make money. Followings have provided some of the methods to make money those people who run video streaming sites:

1. Sell Ads
Advertisements are primary source of income for video streaming sites. The cooperation methods with advertisers are various. For instance, you can provide some of the keywords for the advertisers and they choose the keywords they are interested. When users search for the certain keywords, the Ads will appear. Or, recommend some Ads at the side of related videos or on the first page.

2. Provide Paid Video-On-Demand Services
Some of the unique videos or movies can be provided to users with charges. Users are willing to pay fees for some videos, such as sports event or concerts etc.

3. Affiliate Marketing
Many companies may upload their videos and add the link to their products or services. You can get some of the commissions from the product or service sales especially for those hot videos.

Above has provided some of the methods for video sharing platform to make money. If you prepare to create video sharing platform and want to find the low-cost streaming video solution, you can try to read some guides on low-cost streaming video solutions and promote your videos. You need to wait for seconds and then input your email address, and then you can get this free guide.

The Brief Guide for Choosing Low-budget Server-side Video Encoders to Create Streaming Video Site (2)

In the last part we have made some simple comparisons among three live streaming delivery solutions: FFMpeg, MEncoder and VEE. We will continue more detailed features and comparisons in this part. Let’s take a look at the features of these three streaming video server consoles.

FFMpeg features:

• FFMpeg is a command line tool to provide live streaming delivery solution. It can also grab and encode in real time from a TV card.

• Input frames editable such as text and/or image overlay.

• Join multiple input files in variable formats to one output file.

• Support Frame Input (Bitmap canvas, Bitmap data, Bitmap DeviceContext, YUV).

• Support Frame Output (RGB, MJPEG, H.264, YUV).

• Support Screen Capture.

• Support Wave Capture.

• Support Video Filters, such as flip, negate, scale, rate, etc.

• Support previewing while converting.

• Converting multiple files in batches built in.

• Task thread priority is configurable.

• Pause, Resume and Stop operations are available.

• Log messages event by FFLogger component.

• Conversion progress event.

• Support external standard Video Hook DLLs.

• Include Delphi Video Hooks written in Delphi Language.

• Source of Delphi Video Hook as example is available.

• OnCustomHook event is a very easy and powerful way to edit all input frames acting as internal Video Hook, such as text and/or image overlay, reverse frame picture, and various effects what you can process on Canvas of frame Bitmap.

MEncoder features:

• Encoding from the wide range of file formats and decoders of MPlayer.

• Encoding to all the codecs of FFMpeg's libavcodec.

• Video encoding from V4L compatible TV tuners.

• Encoding/multiplexing to interleaved AVI files with proper index.

• Creating files from external audio stream.

• 1, 2 or 3 pass encoding.

• VBR MP3 audio - IMPORTANT NOTE: VBR MP3 audio doesn't always play nicely on Windows players!

• PCM audio.

• Stream copying.

• Input A/V synchronizing (PTS-based, can be disabled with -mc 0 option).

• FPS correction with -ofps option (useful when encoding 29.97fps VOB to 24fps AVI).

• Using our very powerful plug-in system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate, scale, rgb/yuv conversion).

• Can encode DVD/VOBsub and text subtitles into the output file.

• Can rip DVD subtitles to Vobsub format.

Sothink Video Encoder Engine features (VEE):

• No need to write lots of codec on server side.

• Able to encode almost all popular formats to Flash Video FLV, F4V, and iOS-compatible MP4 files, such as AVI, MP4, WMV, RM, MPEG, MKV, MOV, 3GP, M2TS and more. 

• Supports HTML 5 browser-based video playback via “video” tag. No Flash plug-in required, output videos can be played smoothly on Apple iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3G(s), iPod Touch/Classic. 

• Allows converting HD videos to FLV, F4V and MP4 format on servers. Successfully encode high definition video (1280*720p) with H.264/AVC codec. 

• Can overlay watermark image (PNG) as logo on the top of videos for advertising and copyright demand. Also auto-create meaningful thumbnail images.

• The Demo sites integrated with PHP/ASP/ASP.NET are provided for everyone to test before buy.

Next, I will provide more intuitional tables for comparison among these streaming video server consoles. As Tab.2 shows, VEE not only encodes H.263 but also successfully encodes high definition video (1280*720p) with H.264/AVC codec.

Tips: HTTP Pseudo-Streaming allows your viewers to seek to not-yet downloaded parts of a video. YouTube is an example site that offers this functionality.

As the most popular streaming video server consoles, MEncoder and FFMpeg both support most of the formats. While VEE, as the content delivery solution, supports more, including QuickTime video and Real video.   

As shown in Tab.4, MEncoder, FFMpeg and VEE, all these live streaming delivery solutions support these output formats. However, compared with FFMpeg, MEncoder has a variety of capabilities including copying unmodified audio and/or video into the output file.

For video playback, MEncoder and FFMpeg both support customizing players and can play on Desktop. FFMpeg also supports video playback. The most attractive feature is the output videos of VEE can be successfully played on Apple iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3G(s), iPod Touch/Classic. 

HTML5 may bring many benefits to the mobile web. As we all know, iPhone does not support Flash. However, it supports HTML 5. It means that the iPhone users can watch HTML 5 based videos. So, the video streaming sites created with VEE can be successfully viewed with iPhone. 

Conclusion

FFMpeg, MEncoder and Sothink Video Encoder Engine (VEE) are all great live streaming delivery solutions to create streaming video site. But they are suitable for different people at different level of programming and Website development. 

If you are a novice who expects to add video sharing service to your website or create a streaming video site from zero, Sothink Video Encoder Engine (VEE), as one of the streaming video server consoles, sounds to be a great choice for you. Its full content delivery solution, simple parameters, basic demo site, detailed manuals can help anyone start your own video business from low cost and zero risk. 

But if you are quite familiar with online live streaming delivery solution technologies, with multi-years learning and practice experience, and look for zero-cost content delivery solution, FFMpeg and MEncoder are both suitable for you.