Choosing a Host

If you are publishing to YouTube, this is easy!  You have the advantage of reaching millions of potential viewers while paying nothing for bandwidth or hosting.  But if you want to charge for your video product, or distribute them via your own web site you will need a host for the video files.

I won’t lie to you, it’s a huge mess out there.  It doesn’t take long to find more e-commerce services than I could count, and all of them have fairly obscure presentations about what they really cost and how they work.  You could waste a tremendous amount of time investigating all the options.  I chose to go with e-junkie.com because they had a reasonable rate, reliable up-time, and really easy to set up e-commerce software.  Just be sure to find a provider that offers a hosting rate that you can sustain over time even as your sales drop off.  Selling video files is a trade off between how much you earn from sales vs how much you pay in hosting.  If you don’t do some math, you could get caught paying big hosting fees in a few months without enough sales to support them, thereby killing off your product.  You also don’t want to grow too fast and eat up all your early profits on hosting space you may or may not need.

Conclusions

• I had some concerns that I wouldn’t sell enough for this to be worth doing, so I made sure to put in the effort to make my videos stand out.  I also made sure to find a focused market where the timing was right (Playmaker is relatively new and Unity3D is an extremely popular game engine).  Sales have been strong enough to support me doing at least a couple more tutorial series, which is great!

• I already had a lot of great software/hardware to use for a project like this.  You may not, and thats ok.  There are a lot of inexpensive and free software options that would have worked equally well, and I wouldn’t have had any need for something more feature-rich like Final Cut Pro.  What I did was pretty much garden variety stuff, and I never pushed the limits of any tool I used.  So don’t be afraid to try this for yourself!

• I could have cut my production time in half if I had simply used a voice-chat grade microphone.  Since this is what most people do, it would have been accepted by viewers.  But putting in that extra work has really added a quality level to my videos that most other people simply don’t have, and that has helped my sales and credibility a lot.  A really crappy sounding headset mic will cost you about $65.  A really good sounding microphone will cost you around $100-200.  You aren’t recording studio quality vocals with a band, but you do need to sound professional, so spend appropriately on your microphone.

• The first series I produced took about three times as long as any of the following ones did, which is to be expected.  Plan for this if you are producing videos yourself, and make the smallest thing possible for your first project.

• A commercial product you hope to sell to as many people as possible is not the place to try to show off how great you think some video CODEC is!  Choose a format and CODEC that everyone can view, and stick to it.

• Now that I have my pipeline down and lots of practice, I can produce the standard short YouTube style video in very little time.  I’m looking at ways to leverage this in the future, which is a great new skill to have.

• Consider video tutorials as a way to pay yourself for doing R&D!  I wanted to work out the specifics of a few things in Playmaker and Unity3D, which was going to take a little time.  Combining those things with the body of knowledge I already had about game development has allowed me to earn some income during the early stages of starting up my game development company, and help a lot of other game developers along the way!

• Don’t be stiff!  Next to the audio quality, the best choice I made was to keep these loose and conversational.  People have responded very well to this.  Also, my production time is a fraction of what it would be if I were trying to develop and read a detailed script, and then edit every little mistake.  Just make the mistakes during capture, address them and quickly move on.  Seeing you make a few mistakes and quickly recover gives a lot of information to the viewer that you didn’t intend, because they are probably making those same mistakes too!  They can see you deal with them easily, and maybe even learn features of the software they didn’t know where there.

I’d love to hear about what you make if you try this for yourself.  I wish you all the best!