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After you produce a video, you must develop a plan to publish the content. Many websites will host your video, either for free or for a small charge, making it easy to share your video with the world. While you may have a website, utilizing a video hosting platform is still essential.
The servers that are the backbone of these platforms are designed to handle large amounts of data at high speeds. For example, video hosted on a company website will lead to load time issues and can impact the website’s overall usability. Some video hosting platforms have additional benefits, such as an algorithm to serve your video to new audiences.
There are dozens of options to host your video online, each providing different advantages and disadvantages. Here is a breakdown of the most popular options:
The most popular video hosting platform, and for a good reason. YouTube is free, has no data or bandwidth limits and has an excellent algorithm to recommend your video to users likely to enjoy your content.
However, you may want to choose something other than YouTube for your video hosting platform for a few reasons. The embedding options are there but relatively limited. YouTube automatically displays ads on your video that you may not want on your professional website. Recommended videos are also displayed at the end of all YouTube videos, which could lead to the competitor’s content being fed to users immediately after watching your video.
There are no options for downloading videos from the platform outside of using a third-party app. For most use cases, this isn’t a deal breaker. However, if you want to transfer video between users, YouTube will not be the solution for you.
Overall, YouTube is an important platform to distribute your content for just about any use case, mainly due to the algorithm providing additional reach to a new audience. However, if you are looking for a platform to host a video embedded in an external website, you will want to look into some other options.
This is a popular platform for video professionals, and for a good reason. Vimeo prioritizes video playback quality over anything else. That is why Vimeo has many paid memberships needed to utilize the platform. The free version allows up to 500 MBs of uploads every week, but more is required to upload a single video over a few minutes.
Due to these restrictions, the video playback on the platform is always high quality. Another bonus is having no ads on the platform, making playback even more professional. If you plan on having a video auto-play on your website, Vimeo will be your best bet.
However, the algorithm driving Vimeo is simple, and the user base is much smaller than YouTube’s. Don’t expect to upload videos to Vimeo and find a new audience.
The most popular social media platform on the planet also offers users unlimited and free video uploads. With 3 billion people using Facebook monthly, the platform could be a great option for finding a new audience and communicating with your current audience through video. However, there are some drawbacks.
For one, the quality is capped at HD, meaning you cannot playback 4k video. There are also ads that play randomly on videos, so ads may be off-brand or, at worst, competing directly against you. Due to this, Facebook isn’t a great option for hosting your video and sharing it with other websites. However, this is a great video hosting platform to consider if you are creating videos to find a new audience!
Reach out to Frozen Fire if you have questions about video hosting platforms and your video production needs!
Want to know more about video pricing. Check out our article here.