The benefits of web video when compressing

To follow up on my previous post about HD video - for those of us who shoot for web based news organizations, we know it's often possible to compress video for the web much more than for broadcast. 

Web video tends to be watched on much smaller screens than television. Smaller screens are generally more forgiving if you compress the video. Viewing a heavily compressed video on an HDTV will result in an unsatisfactory level of quality.

Above is a video I shot for Newsmax.TV. It was shot in HDV1080i60. The original file containing the native HDV picture was more than 5GB in size - far too large to send via ftp for a quick turn around. This picture was compressed using the H.264 MPEG-4 compression codec with a significantly reduced data rate. The final file size was a little over 250MB - a substantially smaller file which could be transmitted via ftp in a few minutes. 

The video appears to be high quality. It's only when you expand the picture to view in full screen mode that you notice some pixillation. 

My point is that when it comes to web video, editors have far more leeway to compress. There is a lower expectation among consumers of news on the internet when it comes to video quality. It remains to be seen how long that will last.