What’s The Best Online Video Hosting?

There is no doubt that using video is a powerful way to connect with people. More than any other medium, video allows people to get a sense of who you are. The only way that is more powerful is to meet people face-to-face.

The only problem with this is that you can only meet so many people in any given day and so there is not much leverage there. This leads us back to the next best thing which is video.

Different ways to use video

Basically you can do videos of yourself speaking or screencasts.

Screencasts

A screencast is where you use a recording software to capture your computer screen so you can demonstrate how something is done. This is really good for a how-to videos and this kind of information is highly sought after on the Internet.

You can also record a Power Point presentation using screencasting software which is more like a presentation rather than a how-to type video. These also can be very useful as long as they are not too long or boring.

There is a free screencasting software called Camstudio. I’ve never used it so I don’t know much about it but I’ve heard that it’s adequate for doing this kind of work. If you are on a tight budget then that would be a good choice.

If you have $299 to spend then I would highly recommend Camtasia. I’ve been using it for a few years now and am very happy with it. In fact, I don’t know what I’d do without it now.

Webcam Recordings

This is basically where you use a webcam to record yourself speaking about a particular topic. It’s very easy to do but if you don’t get the settings and light right, your videos can make you look and sound pretty bad. It is possible to get reasonable quality videos out of a webcam though and until you decide to get a more expensive camera it will be fine (it’s all I use at the moment).

What’s The Best Online Video Hosting?

There is a huge number of choices for hosting videos, some paid and many free. I’m not going to talk about paid services today because I’m not actually using any of them at the moment (although I have tried many).

Youtube is perhaps the best known free video platform but it’s not my preference for embedding videos onto my websites.

You can upload your videos to any free video platform and then take a simple piece of code and paste it into the appropriate place on your website and like magic your video appears. The term for this is embedding videos.

Basically the information is being transferred from the video service you choose and is just getting played on your website. One of the traps with many video sharing services is that they will play other peoples related videos once yours has finished.

If the viewer clicks on the actual player they will end up on that persons video channel. This is not so good for marketers wanting to keep visitors on their web sites.

Things to consider when choosing a free online video service;

- Do they have advertisements and is there an option to turn them off? Some services run ads on your videos and you’ll get a commission on the click. It may be a few cents per click but to me, it’s far more valuable to have people stay and watch your video.

- What happens at the end of the video? When someone is watching your video and they get to the end of it, you want to have some control over what they see next. If it’s just ads or someone else’s related videos that’s not ideal in a marketing situation.

- How is the quality of the video and what are the download speeds like? Not all video services are created equal and believe it or not, Youtube is not the best quality service out there. I’ve looked at many different services and the two that I’ve settled on for now are Viddler and blip.tv.

- How much choice do you have with the video players? When you are embedding videos onto your website you may want to change the color and size of the video player. In some cases you may want to adjust the sharing options as well. Of all the players again Viddler and blip.tv seem to offer most customization.

Here’s a video where I talk about why I feel Blip.tv is a very good online video hosting service:

Although I now use blip.tv for embedding my videos, I still upload my videos to all the major video services. You may wonder why I would bother doing that? It’s mostly a traffic and exposure strategy really; I use blip.tv for embedding my videos onto my website and all the other services to get traffic and exposure.

It’s a pain uploading videos to all these different video services so I automate the process using various tools. In another post I will talk about these services and so you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss those posts as they come out (you see at the bottom of this post a box to do that, I prefer to subscribe via email as I don’t use RSS readers at this stage).

I will actually do a blip.tv tips series so you can take advantages of all cool features that they offer…that will be coming soon. For now you may want to duck over and get yourself a free blip.tv account, it’s a piece of cake.

I’d love to hear what you think is the best online video hosting service…