If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is made of several pictures in a sequence, then a video is worth several thousand words.
A great way to show a preview of online content is by using video thumbnails – an ambiguous term that can both refer to a static image, usually depicting one frame of the video (also known as poster image), or, more interestingly, a video preview that’s a smaller and shorter version of the referenced content.
If you arrived to this page through the homepage of my website, you might have noticed that every post on it features an animated thumbnail. It was a natural choice since most of my work on display is some form of animated media, or at least accompanied by video assets.
For a long time my thumbnails have been simple animated GIFs – one of those ancient formats that managed to maintain popularity for longer than expected – but there now is a good selection of modern, more efficient formats to display motion content on the web.