Most of my customers are either going to have a high speed connection, or no computer at all. Yes, customers want downloadable video, especially customers in other countries. The price to ship DVDs along with the ridiculous VAT and other taxes they have to pay is through the roof. I simply don't get orders from several countries whose customers know that delivery is a chance. And I'm getting more and more requests for downloadable products. If ti was only the USA I was dealing with, then shipping is still cheap and reliable enough to not have to worry about it. But the world is a big place, with a lot of potential customers in it.

You did NOT answer the question? What is hi-speed?

Reliable downloading connection at hi-speed in what country? I don't buy it.

Even at mediocre speed, the download would still be faster than postal delivery in some countries. Try shipping USPS to Italy, Philippines, Brazil and see how long it takes, IF it even gets there at all.

Your Pony Express analogy is interesting.
So a 1 gig download takes about 2.6 hrs typically U S Stateside. Factor accordingly for your content bitrate/filesize.

If it took double that time to download in some other country, that's better than waiting over a month for delivery, or non-delivery in some cases, wouldn't you agree?

Mike, the answer is NO! If I were in business to deliver a download in less than 20 minutes to an unknown customer - then that's a deal.

Delivering long form (large volume content) is quite a different animal. If you are under contract say to a school district in eastern Kenya and they have a sufficiently large download pipe at their disposal - it might be worth investigating. You will learn.

I'll be interested to hear an answer to the OP's question about workflow and delivery. I'm not very interested in opinions about his or his client's business plan. I have clients with large video libraries that are considering exactly what the OP is asking about.

0/ No wonder you have problems delivering physical content if you use USPS. National mail services in most countries is terrible. If you mail stuff, use one of the other big international carriers. Very happy with DHL to many places, UPS is great in other regions. UPS uses DHL in other areas. UPS is great in SoCal but rubbish in Brooklyn :-)

1/ I'd do downloadable content, most places in the world now have access to decent speed connections. You're probably going to be fine. The weakest part of the link may be the link to the US, so put your content on Amazon or Azure in a location as close as possible to your potential client.

2/ Consider bittorrent. This may sound weird, but remember, if your .torrent file is not public, nobody can download the content. Charge for the .torrent file and hope people do not share it too much. The advantage of bittorrent is that if the file resides in the building across the street already, it'll be downloaded from there. Also, you won't have to pay for hosting at Amazon or Azure, all your files are only on your PC. You can even monitor who downloads to a degree.

Bittorrent has another advantage over other hosting solutions. If your videos get popular, the download speed for the users increases, some times significantly. Bittorrent is the perfect tool for downloading popular video-based content. With Amazon and Azure, if your videos get popular, at best the download speeds stay the same, BUT, with really popular content, the price you pay to Amazon or Microsoft is going to go up. You pay for bandwidth, with torrents, someone else pays for that bandwidth (your user among them).

3/ Quality, don't forget that your customer might view the videos on their PCs (most likely they will). Quality degrades lots faster on a PC display than on a TV for two reasons. The user sits closer to the screen, and the screen is probably high-resolution (minimum HD, but in corporate PCs probably better).

4/ Format is easy. H.264 is universal and can be played by just about anything these days.

5/ Forget about "zipping" the files. Video files do not shrink when being compressed (possibly quite the opposite) since they are already heavily compressed. You can't compress highly compressed content.

Yes, definitely no zip or rar.
And the h.264 is a good tech, but here's the deal. I have been an IT project manager working in the Fortune 500 long before the Internet boom of the late 1990's and I can testify to how many thousands of times I have witnessed wild bizarre business plans. People get dreamy eyed over the prospects withOUT visiting the fundamentals.

As here, US stateside, a 1 gig file goes down the typical consumer pipe at a rate of file download in 2.6 hrs for those willing to stand for it for whatever reasons they have.
The question is what tech ( and for that matter what does bit-torrent do) to enhance that downloading experience for the end customer. Can you say the download time will be cut to half of the 2.6? How about 80% of 2.6? well then how about 96% of 2.6. You see we have a problem for the end-use regardless of our tireless unrelenting efforts.

I suggest you upload your videos to a private account on Vimeo or Youtube, and allow your clients to view or download, as they wish.

They have the delivery and bandwidth capabilities needed, you probably do not.

If you're going to have a "few" videos for download on your website, the sweet spot is still 720p, 2-4 Mbps depending on motion content of the video.

No wonder you have problems delivering physical content if you use USPS. National mail services in most countries is terrible. If you mail stuff, use one of the other big international carriers. Very happy with DHL to many places, UPS is great in other regions. UPS uses DHL in other areas. UPS is great in SoCal but rubbish in Brooklyn

I have a business where I manufacture items in Australia and I ship to the world. I also buy components in from various countries including the US. I can tell you that in the US you are sold the concept that FedEx, DHL, UPS and such are great ways to send product anywhere, but the truth is the exact opposite. In Australia, all those courier services deliver in the main capital cities but outside of them they contract to local couriers who don't give a hoot, and it is the same all over the world.

Most countries have reliable national mail services, with a few exceptions. And they deliver straight to the customer where couriers often do not. I have sent more than 4500 parcels to all parts of the world using mail services and in the time only ever lost 4 parcels, one was mangled and the other lost by Royal Mail, and the another two were opened and the contents stolen by the Hungarian postal service. Never lost a single item going to the US.

I regularly buy items from the US and have them shipped by USPS, and they always arrive promptly and undamaged, and in most cases they get here before DHL or FedEx can get them here. And they are Way cheaper too.

In answer to MikeLV, I would complete the program and then pass it through Handbrake and try various compression rates, progressively reducing the bit-rate and looking at the result. When you think it looks too bad, go back one step and use that last good rate. As long as you have the files served from a site in the US or Canada, you should do OK. Most countries outside of the US optimise their Internet data rates on feeds to the US for good reason, that's where most of the downloads originate from. And overseas countries are used to having to wait several hours for downloads, what choice do we/they have anyway?

As Musicvid10 says, 720p @ 2-4 Mb/s is good advice.

I would do as the previous poster suggests in Handbrake, except use Constant Quality as your metric rather than bitrate. Once you've found your sweet spot, the bitrate can vary some without affecting temporal quality.

+1 musicvid10's previous comment - vimeo.

i haven't supplied a dvd in years.

my rough cuts and hq final cuts files for clients go via mega.com

hd mp4 finals are on vimeo / youtube as private and downloadable. if client wants to post / host they can on their own accounts.

as for the op's original plan - 1>4 hour. i really think you need to reconsider what and how you're presenting material. it's doubtful anyone will watch anything more than an hour, even if they're interested. the longest 'educational' material i've produced (for gov, corporate, etc.,) in past 10 years has been 50mins, and that was sub divided into 10 minute (clearly defined) chapters for easy viewing.

ushere +1 suggestion is real world. Chapters can be downloadable segments in 10 minute bites of reasonable quality. Download on a typical pipe can be under 2 minutes per segment. So 5 chapters are palatable for a 50 minutes of video and totals only 10 minutes of downloading time with reliability improved as well.

Instead of a 50 minute video taking 1 hour of download time in a single pass.

Wow lots to read, thanks! I appreciate those that wanted to provide business suggestions, and while it's true in some cases that people won't want to watch long videos, it isn't true in all educational scenarios. The business model has been proven for a number of years with DVD. Making the DVDs available as downloads and eliminating the HIGH cost of shipping and HIGH cost of VAT and other taxes will only make it better. The bandwidth and storage fees are not an issue with Amazon S3. I will start playing around with Handbrake settings and frame sizes. Question about resizing - the tutorial recommends 720P. If I want to go smaller than that, is there a scale factor that works better than others, or as long as I keep the aspect ratio the same, then the video will look good at any frame size?

SecondWind-SK, depending on your clients' needs, it seems the best option is to use a shopping cart that has a good virtual product, download feature set. The best I've seen is WooCommerce for Wordpress. They have a plugin that allows you to use Amazon S3 to serve your files for download. I've already conducted download speed tests on a US-based S3 bucket with people in diff parts of the world and the download speed was good for everyone. I did this test because I was worried that I might need a CDN but that is not the case. So it's all a matter of getting the best workflow from my original file format (AVCHD) to H.264 and have the lowest bitrate/highest quality possible. From a Vegas standpoint, that means sizing down from 1080P to 720P or maybe even less depending on the video you're offering. Sizing down means using handbrake because if you do it in Vegas, the quality is not as good at lower bitrates. I think that about sums it up!

I don't know how this might change your costs with Amazon S3 (or you might want to ensure you are the only one with a 1080p master), but personally I would create versions in 1080p, 720p, and 480p (maybe even a 360p). Then let the user choose which version they wanted to download.

If your target audience is projecting the content on a large screen they may want as much resolution as they could get. On the other hand if they had a really crappy ISP (like Rwanda Africa in 2009) or if they just want to watch it on their computer screen this very instant, they might opt for a smaller version.

MikeLV-You posted thus:
Subject: RE: Long-play commercial downloadable content
Reply by: MikeLV
Date: 2/17/2014 10:09:09 AM

Wow lots to read, thanks! I appreciate those that wanted to provide business suggestions, and while it's true in some cases that people won't want to watch long videos, it isn't true in all educational scenarios. The business model has been proven for a number of years with DVD. Making the DVDs available as downloads and eliminating the HIGH cost of shipping and HIGH cost of VAT and other taxes will only make it better. The bandwidth and storage fees are not an issue with Amazon S3. I will start playing around with Handbrake settings and frame sizes. Question about resizing - the tutorial recommends 720P. If I want to go smaller than that, is there a scale factor that works better than others, or as long as I keep the aspect ratio the same, then the video will look good at any frame size?


Whatever became of your search for long play distribution?