What steps are involved in offering 2 hr movie for download?

[edd666666]

Hi, I have a 2 hr DVD that I would also like to sell as a direct download and I would like to know what is required from my websites standpoint. Do I need extra bandwidth to support it, do I need to break the movie into short parts for download, what special software is required for me to offer a movie download and so on. The purpose of offering the video download is to expand the market for the product to international, since shipping the DVD internationally is a bit of a problem in terms of shipping costs, etc.

OK, thanks, Ed.

[Star69]

I'd really like to know, too. And if we don't have our own servers, where online would we store a video file of such size? Anybody know?

[eholmlund]

You could host the file on your own server, or use a free file sharing site, or a file hosting service. I host most of my larger videos on Amazon S3 and it works well.

As far as breaking it up... technically you can offer it as one big file, but some people will have problems downloading it if it's too big. I generally break up anything larger than 100MB.

[Myles Sinclair]

There are quite a few file sharing sites to choose from. RapidShare: Easy Filehosting allows for a maximum file size of 200mb. However, as already suggested, you would probably be better off splitting a large file into smaller files. Anyone with a slow connection would appreciate several smaller files over one large one!

Hope this helps.

Myles

P.S. Remember to name the files something cryptic - so people can't find it with a search engine.

[dhughes]

Megaupload, Rapidshare, Filesaver, and Filedropper are a few decent filesharing sites. Basically the way these work is you upload the files to their sites and they provide you with a link. If you use the free service it will take users to their sites where they will enter the link. If you use the paid service you can get hotlinks so that visitors can just rightclick the link on your site and "save file as."

I hope that helps.

[Craig Fenton]

Hi Ed:

Hope you are well. Regardless of the web host and site you will want to break the video into several clips for a few reasons. Download speed is always important and not everyone will have a top of the line computer with broadband. Another reason is attention span. It can be psychosomatic to many that if they look at an audio or video file for 2 hours it may turn them off. They are thinking this will be hard to follow and get through. If they are feed the product in small doses it will keep them in a positive frame of mind. They will feel this is something that can be helpful and they won't lose their place. When they are done with the 3rd clip they know that they will start with number 4. The other way they have to write down where the time they left off was and if they could forward the video (not always possible) to that spot.

Give the customer who pays our salary reasons to say "YES" and not "no."

Hope this helps!

[stevenh512]

If it's a DVD and it was mastered properly, it should already be broken up into "chapters" and have a menu to select which chapter you want. You might want to consider the option of offering each chapter as a separate download.. but even if you make it one big download in DVD format, with chapters and a menu, it shouldn't be too hard for most people to watch it and pick up where they left off. I don't know of any DVD software that doesn't support chapters and menus (it's part of the standard), and most of the ones I know of will play the DVD video off the hard drive the same as if it were burned or pressed to a disc. Downloading a huge file may be a bit of a pain, but I'd like to think those of us who are stuck with slow internet connections are at least smart enough to use some kind of download manager so that even the downloads can "pick up where they left off" if they're interrupted for any reason.

Originally Posted by eholmlund

I host most of my larger videos on Amazon S3 and it works well.

That's a good idea, especially if you're going to offer it as one big download. S3 offers an advantage that could save you on bandwidth costs and make the downloads a little faster for your users if enough people are downloading it at the same time. You can offer the download as a standard http link and a BitTorrent download (makes it a peer-to-peer download and takes a lot of bandwidth off of S3 because all of your customers are "sharing" parts of the file with each other and only downloading the parts nobody has).

[Harvey Affcash]

I'd actually recommend making it a torrent, and having a few seed peers about the place permanently.
Being a distributive technology, torrents are perhaps the most brilliant file distribution ever, because every person that downloads it also then becomes an uploader. The more people that buy your movie, the more people are seeding it. Means less bandwidth from your side of things, and faster downloads than any of the direct-download file hosting sites will provide.
You also don't have to start all over again if your download is cut off mid way.

uTorrent is possibly the easiest client to use for a first timer, although if most of your customers are unlikely to use torrents at all, there are some great FireFox plugins that basically integrate torrent usage into FF, and make it act like any other download, in so far as the end user is concerned.
FireTorrent comes to mind.
And I'm sure there are similar plugins for IE8.

[edd666666]

I also received this information that looks really good for what I am trying to do:

try e-junkie.com

that is the short answer. their customer service has all the answers you need.

once you sign up with them all you need to do is copy/paste an order button to your website.

and get a paypal account and a google checkout account.

yes, they charge rent monthly. BIG HINT: the rent does not increase as sales increase. this is the make or break part of the deal.


Thanks, Ed