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When I first made acquaintance with the internet, it took a ridiculous amount of time to load websites. Even in later stages of evolvement, it could take several minutes to load a short Quicktime or WMV video.
It's almost ludicrous to look where we've come. And we're just about getting started. A full day's worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, and that pales in comparison to the total streaming count.
It's only natural to match your website strategy accordingly. Video is on the rise, and it won't hurt to consider it a vital information medium. And although this is far from lost on many websites, there's more you can do than just embedding YouTube or Vimeo movies. That's where VP Factory comes in.
VP Factory [No Longer Available]
To avoid confusion later on, let's discuss what VP Factory is not. VP Factory is not a video content managing system. It doesn't offer a video-centered authoring platform like you'd see at YouTube, or other websites back-ends like GameTrailers or Hulu.
VP Factory allows you to create a custom video player, which you can use to play videos or video playlists on your website. Plain and simple. You also needn't worry about installing anything on your own website's server, because the players - if not the videos - are pulled in from the VP Factory server and embedded in your website's HTML. This also means you can easily combine VP Factory with other CMS suites like Drupal, Joomla, or even WordPress.
The VP Factory process consists of three simple steps. First you want to add videos to your collection using the VP Factory interface pictured above. Note that the free plan does not include video storage, so you need to pull in videos from your own server, or embed them from YouTube.
Next up, you can design your own custom video player. The free version gives you four standard skins to start from. These can then be further customized by changing the color scheme, buttons, and default settings.
Finally, we can build our player. A player, using VP Factory, doesn't just consist of the flash object, but is paired with a certain set of videos. Now it's time to make a selection from the videos uploaded in the first step of the process.
Free Version Limits
Considering what VP Factory has to offer, it's not wholly surprising that they're after some profit in this. The free version of VP Factory has a number of limits enforced on it, and will only suffice for smaller, personal websites. Professional users who are in need of more bandwidth are then lured to one of the paying membership subscriptions, at a starting price of $9.
As mentioned earlier on, the free version is limited to four starter skins, and does not include free storage. Probably the biggest limitation, however, is the 10,000 player views limit per month. As such, contrary to creating single-video players, creating playlists might help you keep below the player views limit.
Do you know of any other way to create a custom video player with free features? Let us know your personal recommendations in the comments section below!