Tag: Video

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April 8, 2013 is the Big Day for Skype and Microsoft

April 8th, 2013 will be a big day for Skype and Microsoft. That’s the day that Microsoft pulls the plug on Live Messenger and other Live products in favor of Skype. Personally I loved the Live products. I used Live Mesh and Live Messenger for business and found both easy to use. Plus I used Live Mesh remote desktop when I traveled to connect to my computer all for free.

I like Skype but have not used it much, however I have already started to move ahead of the April 8th deadline to embrace these new products. When you set up Skype you are now asked to login with your Live ID which then migrates all your Live Messenger settings.

Here are just a few things you will be able to do with the new Skype:

• Broader device support for all platforms, including iPad and Android tablets.
• Instant messaging, video calling, and calling landlines and mobiles all in one place.
• Sharing screens.
• Video calling on mobile phones.
• Video calling with Facebook friends.
• Group video calling.

You can read more about this important new update in this interesting article.

What I find very exciting is to consider what Microsoft will be doing with Skype in the future. Will we see Bing Ads integration for click to call options for advertising? Will we see Skype used on Facebook as Bing tighten their partnership? Who’s to say what’s in store, but this is just the start of an exciting new integration with Skype and Microsoft products.

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Should You Use YouTube Embedded Video or Flash?

For web designers, it is a question that is troubling – should you embed a YouTube video in your website page or should you render the video into Flash. There are cases to consider using either.

Embed a YouTube Video

You want want to pull the “share” <iframe> video code to embed your website page if you have an active YouTube channel or want to drive traffic to it. Loading your video onto YouTube makes it shareable not only for your site, but for others as well. Additionally, YouTube makes sharing your video easy on a blog.

Render Your Video into Flash

This used to be the preferred way for a website designer to share a video on a web page. The super snappy load time and ability to control the size and frame design made it a preference, but not necessarily today in our world of smartphones. Remember iPhones still can’t read Flash. Using a Flash video solved the problem that some browsers USED To have with <iframe> code which is not a problem today.

My Preference

My preference is to use the <iframe> from YouTube for embedding video in website pages. Even just two years ago, the Flash route gave more compatibility, but in today’s world YouTube video embed code is definitely the way to go.