When I first got my internet connection, it used to take a ridiculously high amount of time to load websites. In later stages of evolvement, it would take even several minutes to load short Quicktime or WMV videos.

When I think of the times we’ve come from, I sometimes laugh. 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.

Let’s first discuss what VP Factory is not. VP Factory is not a video content managing system (CMS). 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 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 easy steps. First you want to add videos to your collection using the VP Factory interface. 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. (Make sure you have enough bandwidth if you are streaming videos from your own server.)

Next, you can design your own custom video player. The free version gives you four standard skins to start from. You can then further customize these 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.