In the Internet age, online video is an integral role of many websites. People like to watch videos on the internet. Websites adding videos online are becoming mainstream, and online video is transforming the way we watch movie, TV programs, communicate and learn.

Online video is a killer application for the Internet and many online rich media marketing strategies are base on video marketing. People are browsing, searching, viewing and sharing video media files interactively. Video sharing websites such as YouTube receives tens of thousands of home made videos everyday, ranging from tips on how to make your next bookshelf, to the various home-made teasers of the latest movie, right to tips on losing weight. You can create videos on pretty much anything you are interested about: news events, entertainment, business events and trainings, personal videos and even for political events. A business website can also use online video to increase customer intimacy and creditability.

The easiest way to integrate video to your website is by uploading your video file to an online video sharing website (such as YouTube), which will create a player for your video file and display the HTML code for you to insert to your web page. There are a few problems, however, if you are too dependent on these video sharing websites.

First of all, these online video websites usually add their own watermark to the videos and makes them their property. For some people this is acceptable, but serious users and business owners are having problems with this practice. Not to mention the privacy issue which is very common among video sharing websites, because all uploaded videos can be copied from online websites very easily and added to any other website.

There are several third party software and websites that make downloading videos from online video websites to hard drives a breeze. Sadly this creates an issue with copyright protection.

When you spend your time making the video, regardless of the topic or quality of your story, you would like to have full ownership of that video. However because you have submitted your video to a public video sharing websites, you can no more claim exclusive ownership rights on the video file.

This is one major reason is why having the videos in your full control is crucial and makes uploading them to your own server a must. With fast falling hosting fee and disk storage cost, nowadays it is much easier and affordable to host the videos on your own server. Many web developers are converting video files into flash video file format (FLV, which is the same format most video sharing websites including YouTube are using). The FLV file are then hosted on their own web server, so that their visitors can view the video directly, without connecting to a third party video server.

Flash video (.FLV) is a standard for online video streaming from Adobe Inc. Flash video format can compress movie file much more efficient than that of the traditional video formats (such as WMV, AVI, MOV, etc), and it takes much less buffering time when the user clicks on the Play button. FLV is a streaming movie format, Which means that the video will play a lot faster over the Internet, and viewers can rewind the video to any previous location easily without spending time waiting for the movie to reload.

In order to support video playing, different video file formats require a plug-in to enable them to be played over the Internet in different web browsers. Another advantage of FLV file format, is that Adobe Flash plug-in is installed on over 95% of personal computers. That means you and the visitors of your site are most likely among those people that don’t have to download anything to watch a flash video. Flash video format are also platform independent. flash video file format can be easily played on a Windows PC, a MAC, a Linux machine, or even a smart phone, which makes it the most compatible video format available nowadays.

Another advantage of embedding video on your website using FLV file format, is that you can use different types of video player skins to play the FLV file, while most other video file format requires you to use their default player online. You can easily select and change the skins to your FLV video player , which in turn makes the player unique among the many others out there. Adobe Flash itself is a rich media creating tool, and offers lots of functionality to developers to customize the look and feel of its video player component.

And if you are not a programmer, there are also many shareware and freeware software, which can easily convert your existing videos in other formats, such as mpg, avi or wmv, to FLV video file format, and then let you select a pre-designed video player skin which can integrate nicely with your existing website.

In additional to a standard video player component with play, pause, rewind, fast forward buttons, you can also add your own link, logo image and copyright messages in the video, as well as additional features such as creating a video play list with thumbnail images.

Flash video format (FLV) has became a clear winner over many other video solutions with its popularity among video sharing websites, and because of its distinct advantage of cross platform support and built-in streaming capability. If you have video files you like to put online and hosted on your own server, you should consider converting it to FLV format before you embed it to your web page.