Steve Jobs once remarked: “(One should) be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." These days it seems that everyone has caught on to Mr. Jobs' ideal of an excellent experience. From the product design to the inner-workings of a web service API, we have high expectations for quality and user experience. When it comes to video and audio in particular, the bar for quality is continually rising. The race among device manufacturers to produce ever-more precise displays and speakers is teaching consumers to seek out content that takes advantage of these capabilities. Apple’s new retina displays have high enough pixel density that the human eye is unable to notice pixelation at a typical viewing distance. While some things that negatively impact user experience, such as actual device resolution or quality of available network connection, are out of a content owners control, the publisher can mitigate these issues by taking steps in the content preparation process that can significantly affect the quality of the content, creating online experiences that stand up to the best offline ones. From knowing how to best target a variety of devices to understanding effects of bitrate and codec, producing the best possible video for each viewer can be accomplished by following a few simple recommendations:

• Encode video to the highest quality for each device.
• Use an adequate bitrate
• Use the best available encoding technology
• Don’t overlook audio
• Encode from high-quality content

To learn more about each of these recommendations, download our Encoding for Quality white paper, written by Zencoder video quality experts.