First off:
Thank you for joining us!
Since 2013, we’ve helped thousands of businesses, just like yours, deliver fast starting, buttery smooth playback experiences to your customers, or your client’s customers’. Swarmify SmartVideo works a bit differently than traditional video hosting you may be used to, but don’t fear, follow the steps below to get up and running quickly!
SmartVideo consists of two key parts that work together.
- JavaScript snippet: This is small script placed above the </HEAD> tag on your website that enables the SmartVideo tag and functionality.
- SmartVideo tag: This is used for actual video publishing on your website. This controls how you want it to appear on your page, and where. Similar to an embed code, but not exactly. This part is needed unless you are using our YouTube/Vimeo auto-conversions.
Below are the steps involved in accomplishing those two items.
Step 1: Install our WordPress plugin. Installing and activating our WordPress places our JavaScript in the correct location on your website easy.
Alternate method: If you don’t use WordPress, or want to manually place the JavaScript on your site, here’s how to accomplish that. (see "Other CMS'")
Step 2: Use our SmartVideo tag to publish video to your page. If you have YouTube or Vimeo embeds on your page already, you can enable auto-conversion like this (YouTube) and this (Vimeo).
Alternate method: use our SmartVideo tag for WordPress and non-WordPress CMS’ to manually add or control what original file source cloud locations/buckets you use. SmartVideo supports (including publishing tutorials) WordPress Media Library, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, Dropbox, Google Drive, and even pCloud as the original file source location. You can also have the files directly on your server too and provide the URL to its location.
Here’s a few more links to resources that guide you through all the other cool customizations you can make with SmartVideo here, and here.
How we differ from traditional video hosts:
Aside of our fast-starting, buffer proof playback experience technology, publishing with Swarmify works a little differently than most video hosts in a couple of other ways. We believe you should be in possession of your original files online at all times. As a result, we pull a copy from a variety of original source locations of your choice. Most customers keep their original files in some type of online cloud location/bucket anyway. Here's the full list we officially support.
So when you publish a video to your website:
1. You merely point Swarmify to where that original files lives (Step 2 above).
2. Swarmify fetches a copy of that file one time, processes 5-10 encodings of each for all desktop and mobile devices
3. Stores those various encodes on a global delivery network.
4. Finally, Swarmify delivers and accelerates playback in our clean, lightweight player to your end-users.
In other words, once we grab the file from your location one time, we handle all the parts thereafter including storage of all files streamed to end-users.
What to expect after installation:
Unlike images, video is not instant. There is a natural delay between installing Swarmify on your site and seeing your videos optimized. This is completely normal due to processing and encoding times of video. A good rule of thumb is your video will take about 2x the video's length for SmartVideo to complete optimization. For example: if your video file is 10 minutes in length, it will take around 20 minutes to convert and serve back from Swarmify.
This is how you know Swarmify is done processing and delivering your video.
Thanks for reading, enjoy the platform!