This Week's Video Production Tutorial
The Best Way to Stream Video from the Web
One of the questions we get asked a lot is, 'What's the best way to stream videos from my website?'. The answer to this question depends greatly on the nature of your video promo, the amount of traffic you're expecting and the type of marketing strategy that you are planning on using with your video promo.
Hosting Your Video Promo on Your Own Website
If your video is fairly short (perhaps less than two minutes) and you are not expecting high volumes of web traffic to your website then you can usually host your video promo on a normal shared web hosting package. There are a number of different formats that you can use for this, however, the best choices at the moment are Flash (.fvl) and H.264 MPEG format.
Hosting Your Video Promo on YouTube
If you are concerned about bandwidth and you are expecting high volumes of traffic then YouTube is a great platform for hosting your video promo. The two great benefits that come from using YouTube are that (1) it's free of charge and (2) it's a good means of attracting traffic to your video promo. The advertising potential of YouTube cannot be understated. We've even had one client whose video has enjoyed well over a million views on YouTube. If you want your video to be on your website but hosted by YouTube then you can easily achieve that by grabbing some HTML code from your YouTube account and pasting it onto your webpage. You can see an example of this in action by clicking here.
One of the disadvantages of hosting your video promo on YouTube is that it's very difficult to "drip feed" your content. In other words, you cannot stagger the times between people watching each of your videos (assuming you have more than one video). This could become important if you are planning a product launch which involves more than one video.
Hosting Your Video Promo With Amazon Web Services
Of course, there may be reasons why you might want to have your video hosted on your website. If that's the case and you're expecting large volumes of traffic then another solution is to use Amazon. Within the last two years Amazon have released a hosting package to the public, called Amazon Web Services, that has been designed specifically for users who are expecting to consume high levels of bandwidth and who require vast areas of webspace. In most cases this represents a much cheaper and more reliable hosting solution than those that might be offered by normal web hosting companies. The general idea is that you host your site with your own web hosting company as normal, however, your video content would be hosted on Amazon. This type of hosting arrangement ensures that you have enough horsepower to stream videos even if you have thousands of visitors arriving at your website at once.
These are just a few of the hosting options which are available for anyone who wants to stream videos via the web. If you need any further advice or if you have any questions, please do get in touch and we'll be happy to help.