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After updating our keyword research this month, I was surprised to see how many people are Googling “compress video for email”. I had assumed that everyone knew that it was a bad idea. As it turns out, I was wrong. This reinforced my thoughts that keyword research is for more than SEOs, it is a valuable research tool that enables you to tap into your prospect’s needs.

In this post I am going to explain the 4 main reasons that you shouldn’t compress video for email.

Spam Filters

Video files can be quite large. Compressing them is resource intensive and take a considerable amount of time, even for a short video that 3-5mins in duration. Let’s pretend that you have compressed your video for an email, and have gotten it under the usual 10mb file size limit that most mail clients have. The first step is to upload the video file to your mail client before you can send it. [Another step in the process which eats time.] Let’s say you make it this far and get to the point when you are sending the video. On the recipients end, email clients do not like large attachments and usually send them to spam. This is an EPIC Fail (aka: a big waste of time).

Note: If your video is very short (less than 2min in duration) and you set your webcam to record in 320×240 format, you can usually bypass the need to compress the video. However, “compatibility” is still going to bite you.

Compatibility

Forgive my sarcasm here; I am British, and we have a very dry sense of humor. Okay here goes: you are compressing the video for email because you ultimately want the recipient to watch it, right? Let’s pretend you made it by the spam filter (which is a miracle in itself). Here’s where we run into another issue: most business users are on a Windows computer and use Microsoft Outlook. Webcams usually record to a Windows Media file (.wmv). Guess what, .wmv isn’t universally compatible with Mac, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android devices. Let’s say you compress the video to Flash (.flv). You will still be SOL on Apple mobile devices.

Tracking

I am a big-picture guy. Too much data can definitely weigh you down, but knowing if a recipient actually watched your video is a key piece of information. When you compress a video for email and then send it, you can’t track if the recipient(s) have watched it. I guess, if you have a lot of time to spare, you could call and ask them.

Privacy

Circulating hard copies of your video files via email is a huge liability. The recipient could upload the video to a video sharing site and distribute your private message to thousands. While this may be unlikely, it is possible and it does happen. A stray email message is one thing, but a private message circulated publicly can cause some real problems. Just imagine the extreme side of some of the things you say in an email being aired on public television, and you will get the idea of what I’m talking about.

Conclusion

When you use a business-class video email service like jiveSYSTEMS, you get all of the benefits without any of the headache. To gain a better understanding of what our video email software has to offer, check out the “7 Core Features of jiveSYSTEMS“.