You’ve just created your marketing video.  Uploading to YouTube is the best solution for adding to your website.  (You will embed your YouTube video.  YouTube provides the tools for doing this.)

YouTube displays on all platforms saving you the time and aggravation of converting your video to multiple formats, then coding your website to handle all the configurations.  It’s a simple solution.  Beyond that YouTube is owned by Google which strengthens your positioning for…search engines.  Add to that you can configure your YouTube account for keywords and general SEO.  All these advantages are significant.

You test your video, on Macs, PCs, cells and then..the iPad.  On every other device you get the typical YouTube box around your video, allowing the user to view from your website, or go to YouTube; change the quality settings up to the maximum resolution you chose when saving your video file.  Everything works as expected and seamlessly.  Every platform except the iPad.   While a box appears around it with what seem to be links, (just as you see on your PC) these are disabled.  You can make the video full screen to the disappointment of seeing it displayed as the lowest resolution.  Given the expectation of iPad’s video display this is shocking when you first discover it.  But there is no way around it.  Even if you code the embedded link with “video quality” to display 720 it will not improve the quality on the iPad.  Speculation is the Apple hates Google…Google hates Apple battle, but no way of confirming this.  Apple never wavered on allowing Flash, it’s doubtful this scenario will change, either.

The workaround?  Provide a direct link to your YouTube video below your video specifically for iPad users.  The issue is delivering your video with options of quality for the user.  I’ve since migrated to Vimeo. The screen capture below explains YouTube needs.