Video Production – To Host Or Not to Host

We get a lot of questions regarding hosting video. Another question that comes up almost as frequently is on the subject of YouTube, specifically putting YouTube videos on your blog or site. We’re going to discuss the pros and cons of hosting vs. video sharing sites.

When it comes to getting your video content on the Internet you have roughly two options. Either upload your videos to a hosting service or upload your videos to video sharing sites. We actually use both YouTube and hosted videos on our training site. Why would we use both? Let’s look at the options first.

1. Upload your videos to YouTube and then paste the embed code in your blog. Let’s start with the cons. The con to YouTube is you have ads that can pop up in your video. Also, when the video is over, YouTube shows you options for other videos. If your viewer clicks one of those other videos, they click “out” from your site and they might not come back. Also, you can’t control the quality, although with the addition of HD to YouTube, it’s really not a big deal anymore. The pro to this is it’s easy to do and you now have your video in more than one place. If you were referencing somebody else’s video is a time you would do that, or if you were responding to a YouTube video with a video of your own. If you want people to pick up your video and put it on their blog, getting the embed code is simple. You can get stats on YouTube videos. Google owns YouTube and they pay very close attention to what’s going on. You can add keywords to YouTube videos that helps make them searchable. And the biggie, it’s free.

2. Upload your videos to a server and then stream from the server to your site. Pro’s: you control everything. Length, quality, what’s on the screen, links at the end of the video, etc. You choose the exact details of your entire video. This gives you lot’s of options. The look of your site is a little more credible when you are using your own hosting. It’s also much more secure. Con: It’s a little bit more intensive but once you get it, you’ll probably like it a lot. There is a fee for hosting.

We use Amazon S3 for our video hosting. They are reliable and their pricing is extremely reasonable. A lot of people are using S3 and would never go back.

Amazon S3 is just the storage for our videos. We also use a service that helps us upload our videos and add player buttons. This service gives us an embed code that we embed in our blog and that’s it. Done.

If you would like to know more about Amazon S3 and also how to set up your Amazon account along with providing you multiple options for uploading your videos to S3, be sure to read our report on Amazon S3.

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