Business Guidelines For Flash Movie Download Times
I'm writing a document detailing requirements for web content supplied by agencies for our sites and have now got to the part about Macromedia Flash content. The sites are very large corporate ones that target both other businesses and consumers. Currently there is no Flash content at all. The front end technology is HTML with very limited use of JavaScript. So the Flash content, if any, is going to be video/audio embedded in HTML templates deep inside the sites.
The Flash content that the internal clients are interested in, is tied to marketing campaigns. I doubt that any of it will be so compelling that people come to the site just to watch the Flash movie. Rather, it's going to be incidental. A surprisingly high number of our users access the sites using 56K modems or ADSL broadband so our guidelines need to take that into account.
My questions:
a. at what file size do you start using a preloading screen?
b. how long is it reasonable to expect users to wait for a download given that it's marketing material? 30 seconds? 1 minute? Less? More?
The Flash content that the internal clients are interested in, is tied to marketing campaigns. I doubt that any of it will be so compelling that people come to the site just to watch the Flash movie. Rather, it's going to be incidental. A surprisingly high number of our users access the sites using 56K modems or ADSL broadband so our guidelines need to take that into account.
My questions:
a. at what file size do you start using a preloading screen?
b. how long is it reasonable to expect users to wait for a download given that it's marketing material? 30 seconds? 1 minute? Less? More?