Technology offers a huge array of digital tools for today’s communicator. New devices. Slick platforms. Technological slight-of-hand. The real trick, however, seems to be in knowing which tool to use to do your communicating. Gary Vaynerchuk, host of Wine Library TV, an online wine review show featuring weekly webisodes, understands that streaming video is the perfect selection for his product.
Visitors to Wine Library TV find Gary’s latest webcast cued up and ready to go in a Flash 10 player. The market penetration that Flash enjoys, along with its agnostic platform (it prays to neither the Mac or PC gods), make it the smartest choice for savvy marketers like Vaynerchuk. The last thing he wants his viewers to do is to navigate away from his site in search of a plug-in for QT or Real. Additionally, Flash now has enabled H.264 video compression, providing great quality video while taking up about half the bandwidth of MPEG-2.
Streaming video is the perfect tool for Veynerchuk’s hand-waving, wine-slurping webisodes. He’s an entertainer who engages all the senses, making video the right delivery medium for his wine reviews and sports predictions. His full-screen option is nice, but the loss of quality at full size is a bit of a distraction in today’s high-definition culture. Nothing that a good glass of red won’t take care of, however.
