e_Marketing

I am often asked: "How can I put my own video on my website?"

There are two distinct issues you have to address, and for the newbie both of them can be pretty overwhelming.

First, there is the little problem of actually creating the video. I don't want to get into production in this post. I'll save that for later. Right here I want to address the second issue...

How do I get my video on my website?

The first thing you have to do is choose whether you want to self-host (host it on your own site, or another site you have access to) or use one of the video sharing sites such as Youtube. (I will use "Youtube" as a short form for "Youtube or other video-sharing sites".)

The advantages of self-hosting are that you have full control over the way it will appear, what the thumbnail will look like, and a few other things. You will also not get the Youtube branding or accompanying ads that they are often putting with videos now.

The disadvantages of self-hosting are that you will have to provide the bandwidth for streaming the video, and you will have to do a bit more web coding to make it work properly. You will also have to encode it in the right format to make it work. It is actually fairly simple if you have the right tools.

The advantages of using a video-sharing site are that they do all the encoding work for you, so all you have to do is just include a bit of embedding code on your page to "embed" it. The sharing site will also provide free bandwidth and keep track of the total number of views. You also will get traffic from their site because your video will be searchable within their site. AND, it will be indexed by the search engines, so your video may get some views that way.

The disadvantages of using a video-sharing site are that the quality of he video may not be as good (this varies from site to site), they "brand" it with their logo, etc., and you may not get the thumbnail you want.

For our purposes we use both of these approaches (self-hosting and video-sharing.) In some cases - for instance, in a blog - it is easier just to plunk in the embed code, modify the size to fit properly, and you're done.

In other cases we don't want the branding or the clunky player that Youtube wraps videos in, so we create our own versions with nicer looking players, and run the videos from one of our own sites.

Also, when using a video-sharing site as a host we usually do not use Youtube, because the quality of the images and thumbnails are better with others such as Revver and Soapbox.

For samples of videos hosted by Revver and Soapbox have a look at CVNVideo.

For samples of self-hosted videos see Linknet Video.