More and more these days, services are popping up on the web that offer to host your videos for you…for a price. These are called video hosting sites…and although they are similar to video sharing sites like YouTube…they are not the same thing.
With video hosting sites, you still upload your videos and get a block of code to paste into your web page or blog to display your video. The difference however, is that video hosting sites will give you much higher quality video and won’t give the viewer a method to leave your site at the end of the video (ala YouTube). On top of this, they may also offer some additional player functionality.
And…all for a price. Typically around $30 a month for 10 gigabytes of bandwidth. These services are targeted towards business owners who want total control over their videos…and…don’t want to have unprofessional looking YouTube-type videos on their site.
So are these video hosting services worth it? Most times, the answer is NO. And that’s because of the cost.
For instance, if a video hosting service is charging you $30 a month for 10 gigabytes of bandwidth, you are actually paying $3 per gigabyte. By contrast, most CDN’s (content delivery networks) only charge you about 20 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth (that’s $2 a month compared to $30).
So the savings for the “do-it-yourselfer” are obvious. But by doing things yourself, you’ll also have to know how to convert your videos into Flash or QuickTime and then embed them into your web pages. It’s certainly not hard to do…but it can scare beginners to death.
So when are video hosting sites a smart move? Only when they offer you features that make the extra cost worth it. For instance, video statistics. I’m not just talking about the number of views your videos get, but how long people watched your videos, at what point they stopped watching, when they hit the rewind button and so on. Or maybe they offer video players branded with your logo. Or maybe they let you select the size for your video after you upload it. Or maybe they give you some other hard-to-pass-up feature.
To date, I have yet to come across a video hosting service that offers all of these features (or in many cases, even just some of them). If someone else has…and would like to pass the info on…please let me know about it.
Hi Dave
I use a service called Stream Hoster, http://streamhoster.com/streaming_services.html , that charges $15 per month that provides 500 MB’s of storage and 5,000 MB’s of streaming data per month. I use them to host video tours of homes I have listed for sale. I use Advanced Access to host my web site who only allow me to upload files up to 10 MB’s so I have to use a company like Stream Hoster. I used to use a company called Video Desk who charged $19.95 per month for 100 MB of storage and 1,000 MB of data transfer. Video Desk did allow me to resize the player which was nice but I needed more storage. Each company offers upgrades that allow more storage and data transfer. If anyone knows of another service that allows resizing the player with similar storage and transfer volume for $15 or less please let me know.
Hi Dave – I want to inform you of a newer corporate video sharing site called eCorpTV.com. The site features business related video content and does offer premium services like video statistics. The main unique selling proposition is that the site prescreens all videos for approval before posting in order to ensure there is no inappropriate content.
You can check it out at http://www.eCorpTV.com
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