Great Way To Easily Post Flash Video On Your Website

(tricked ya… that’s not a real video… it’s just a picture

I’m always on the lookout for awesome new tools and ways to save me time and give my customers a better user experience.

As you know… video is pretty much a must nowadays and if you’re not using video you’re going to be left in the dust.

Anyhow, as I type this… we’re in a little “launch” over at the real estate investing site where we’re going to be teaching our readers over the next couple weeks how to get private money for their real estate deals.

Long story short… we’re using video heavily in this series and I was pulling my hair out trying to find an easy and cheap way to get video up on the site… other than posting it to the masses of video sharing sites.

Nothing wrong with using Youtube, Viddler, etc. to host the video… but I’d rather have full control over the video and make sure there’s no chance the reader can click on the video and be taken to the Youtube site and diverted to someone elses videos.

My Easy Flash Video Solution

I was watching a few internet marketing product launches recently and did a bit of investigative work to see what they were using for their flash video.  Some were simply using the JW FLV Player and streaming from Amazon S3 (if you’re not streaming your videos from S3 and you’re getting any traffic at all… you should seriously start doing it… cheap as heck and great servers.  By cheap I mean… I only paid .15 cents last month… ya) … but I got frustrated at the whole thing after 30 minutes of toying around with it and trying to get it hooked up to my .flv file.

Then, I kept seeing this “ezs3” thing coming up in the code for some of the big guys (Ryan Deiss and others) and decided to check it out.

Basically, what this “ezs3″ thing is is a service that makes it easy as heck to put flash video on your site hosted through Amazon S3.  Here’s a video I put up today using this service… looks extremely sharp and loads very fast.  And… you can customize the look of the player pretty much any way you want very very easily.

The Benefits Of EZS3

Yes, at the JW FLV Player site there is a free tool that will build the script that you can embed into your website.  I was actually going to go that way but I’m not a huge techie so it took me way too long and I got confused about half way into the process when I was trying to link the video script to the actual .flv video file hosted on Amazon S3.

So, I signed up for a free trial over at EZS3 (it’s 14 days free, then $20 after that a month… a bargain IMHO) and tested it out.

Here’s What I Did:

• Uploaded my .flv video file to Amazon S3 easily through the free S3 Firefox add on in my browser.  Took about 3 minutes.
• Got in my EZS3 account and hooked it up to my Amazon S3 account.  Took 45 seconds.
• Created a player, customized it, and got the script to paste on my web page.  Took 2 minutes (probably actually way less… but I was toying with some of the links).
• Pasted the code in my html file… and uploaded it to the net.

The whole process took me about 6-7 minutes… if I were to do it now I could probably get a video from the raw .flv file to the net in a nice flash video format in under 3 minutes using EZS3.

And… that video I showed you before is the result of that first try with their service.  I’m sold… and will for sure renew my membership at the end of my 14 day free trial.

Check Out EZS3… But Don’t Take My Review For Gospel…

Try it yourself…

If you’re already using Amazon S3 to stream your videos from this solution is way the heck easy for you to implement… and it may just save you a ton of time and money in the process because it’s only $20 a month and its easy as heck to use.

Here’s a few other cool things about EZS3 that I like a ton:

• Has great stats to show how many times the video (or any other file you use with this) has been viewed.
• You can pretty much fully customize the look, size, functionality, etc. of the video player… very flexible.
• Can use this service to easily display other files too… like pdf’s, other video file types, camtasia studio projects, etc.
• Can change the video display unit on the fly… even after you’ve already published the script to the web page.  It all runs on Javascript so you can make changes after you publish the video to the net, right in the EZS3 membership panel and the changes take place immediately.

Anyhow, I know this post looks kind of like an infomercial or a big ol’ product review… I didn’t mean for it to be like that… I really did just find out about this service today and am now sold on it for my own biz.

Check it out… get the free 14 day trial… let me know what you think!