Some Thoughts on Hosting Video

Written 23/10/09

We're getting a lot of enquiries now from customers who want to put video on their sites. Unsurprising really as we are finally getting to the point where video over the Net is starting to live up to the promises we were hearing in the early days of broadband.

In essence there are two ways of doing it. You host it yourself or you let someone else host it for you. The obvious people to use for the second option are YouTube. They will host your video for you and it's easy to embed the video on a page on your site. If you're using our Opus content management system it's very easy to do, you just paste the HTML they give you in the "Embed" field into your article.

Using YouTube has a number of advantages most fundamentally that it's free and that it scales well, so if 1,000 people decide to watch you video at the same time your server doesn't groan under the weight.

There are some down sides however:

  1. If you embed a video hosted at YouTube in your web site then it may be branded with the YouTube logo. They seem to run hot and cold with this one, We don't think they can make up their mind whether it's a good thing or not. When it's on we think it's a bit tacky.
  2. If you view a video on their site you may get an advert popup added. Again that's not good.
  3. We don't like YouTube's terms and conditions on ownership. See this page under 10.1:
    When you upload or post a User Submission to YouTube, you grant:

    1. to YouTube, a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence (with right to sub-licence) to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that User Submission in connection with the provision of the Services and otherwise in connection with the provision of the Website and YouTube's business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels;
    2. to each user of the Website, a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, licence to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions to the extent permitted by the functionality of the Website and under these Terms.
    So you have to allow other users to make "derivative works" from your videos. That's essentially giving up your copyright and it could mean that people in the video could end up in someone else's too! We really don't think that's what you would want in a lot of cases.

So if you want a cheap and cheerful solution and can live with the down sides then use YouTube. Alternatively we can provide a fully hosted solution. We can set up your web site so that you can embed videos in it (using simple Opus {video:...} tags) and we can also do the work needed to prepare your video for use on the Web (mainly converting it to H.264/MPEG-4 format but also any post production you need).

To give you an example of this in action we recently took four DVDs which the Ormiston Children & Families Trust had commissioned, extracted the video from them, tweaked the volume levels, converted them to the right format and put them on their web site. You can see them here.

So if you would like to host video on your web site, whether it's one we originally designed or not, then do get in touch and we'll see if we can help.

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