A Poster First, the Player When Somebody Presses Play
An embedded video is the single heaviest thing most actor websites carry, and almost all of that weight is spent before anybody watches anything.
What a standard embed costs
Dropping in the code a video site gives you does not embed a video. It embeds an entire player: the interface, the analytics, the recommendation engine, the advertising machinery. All of it downloads and starts running as the page loads, whether or not the visitor ever presses play.
Two embeds on one page can pull the better part of a megabyte before a single frame of your reel is requested. On a laptop on good broadband nobody notices. On a phone on a weak signal it is the difference between a page that opens and a page somebody abandons.
What your site does instead
Your video appears as its own poster image with a play control over it. That is a picture, so it costs about what a picture costs. The real player is fetched at the moment somebody presses play, and then plays immediately.
The visitor experience is the same in the case that matters. Somebody who watches your reel gets your reel. Somebody who does not never pays for a player they were not going to use, and that is most visitors on most pages.
It also means a page with three videos on it is not three times as heavy as a page with one.
Where this sits
Video is one part of page weight. The others are covered in faster page loads, design images on a delivery network and web fonts from a CDN.
For getting videos onto the page in the first place, see finding your own videos on YouTube and making video thumbnails look good. The thumbnail is doing more work here than usual, since it is now the thing standing in for the video.
Speed matters most on a phone, which is where most of your traffic is: mobile optimization for actor websites. Create a free actor website.
