Bundle videos or download later?

Question

I have an application that uses small videos I've created to demonstrate the concepts explained in particular topics. The videos are at least 3MB and I'm unsure of the max but probably 5MB. For v1.0, I'd like to distribute 5 videos. That's ~15MB plus about another meg for the app. Should I distribute the videos through iTunes, where it is likely the user has a faster connection on their computer and the overall experience is better? Is there some size limit that should observe on your .app file?

Or should I put together some sort of on demand scheme? For example, the app can send a code to my website that is used to authenticate. Then the user can download video content via their iPhone. If the user is on wifi or maybe 3G, I guess it is an OK experience. But if all they have is 2G, it will be bad.

v1.1 will include more videos and possibly a redo of an existing video. Each new version can be expected to include more videos.

Just looking for the best way to do this. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

At 15-16MB you may be above average but you certainly won't be in "extreme" territory for size. Apple's got special instructions on uploading apps that are >200MB, so they're prepared to deal with bundles that are much, much larger than you're contemplating. I've got one app on my phone that weighs in at 283MB.

Whether to include the videos or provide for later downloading should really depend on whether you expect new videos to be available to users without downloading a new version of the app.

Having said that, if the videos can possibly be reencoded for a smaller size without significantly compromising their appearance on the iPhone's screen, it would be a really good idea to do so.

Answer 2

Besides app size vs. download time, you may also want to consider whether your app will trigger a flag for rejection if you provide multimedia contents from your web site instead of embedding resources in the application bundle.

Answer 3

I recently saw an alert in the appstore app on the phone that it would not permit me to update the app I was trying to update over 3G as it was > 10MB in size - I had to wait until I had WiFi connectivity. Just another issue to be aware of.

Answer 4

One option:

Whenever you release, only release new videos. The first time the user runs the app, copy any videos from the bundle onto the device. Any time you do a new release, they will have previous videos from previous releases. Any videos/updates that were missed can be downloaded from your website at any time using the authentication scheme you suggested.

Answer 5

I'm facing this dilemma now myself. I'd prefer to embed some usage tutorial videos within my app, but Its going to put my app at around 20MB uncompressed (and I doubt compression will get it below 10MB). I really do not want to lose impulsive downloaders because the app is too large for 3g.

So the strategy I'm toying with is to include the smaller ones up to the point where I'm in danger of going over the 10MB limit, then indicate that the links to any videos which could not be included will stream them over the net. And possibly in a future update, to offer an option to download the vids which were not included then changing those links in the HTML help page to use the cached versions, though I'm not convinced that would be worth the effort.

I'm using iShowU HD right now (though I love the editing capabilities of ScreenFlow, but iShowU is priced right and does enough for my needs) and have managed to crank the video size down some by going to 15fps and playing with the compression slider.