What is Video Hosting?
In the past decade or so, video content has grown significantly in popularity among viewers and publishers. Businesses left and right offer video content to their audience — from the slowly dying cable TV operators to advertisers launching OTT marketing campaigns. With the rise of video content online, there has also been a rise in demand for video hosting. But what is it exactly and should your business use hosting services?
What is Video Hosting?
Video hosting is the act of storing, managing, and delivering video content online, typically via a website, landing page, social network, or email. It’s usually done by uploading a video file to an online storage server and linking to it from a webpage or other website. This can include streaming videos or providing downloads of video files, but it also has other things like embedding them from other sites into yours.
Video hosting platforms can be used for both personal and corporate purposes. The best platforms include the ability to host and share content on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
Some benefits
The biggest benefit of video hosting is that it makes your videos available in lots of places while controlling them from one dashboard. That means you get the best experience possible and can distribute them widely while doing less work. That can free you up to create more videos and get even better results. Here are just some of the benefits:
- An excellent viewer experience. It can make the image crisper (it’ll adjust to people’s devices) and provide a video player with controls.
- Time-saving tools. Hosting services can do most of the hard work of uploading videos automatically. They’ll compress the video if needed and can automatically encode it, making it viewable across devices. Otherwise, you have to remember that Windows Explorer needs H.264 codec, and Google Chrome needs Webm codec – whatever that means.
- More effective video marketing. When you can organize all your videos, you’re more likely to use them and get a better return on investment (ROI).
- Features for hitting your goals: Are you in marketing? Support? Sales? PR? Hosting platforms may offer role-specific features to make uploading and sending easier. For instance, salespeople might be able to record videos from their browser, and customer success teams can group videos based on topic.
- Save time with integrations. Hosting platforms can integrate with other applications so you can push your video to lots of different channels. You can also edit it after it’s been published or quickly take it down (if needed).
- High availability. Hosting platforms replicate your video across data centers around the world, which means it can be available in many countries at once (based on their laws).
- Redundancy. Hosting offers automatic backup, so if your site fails, your video won’t go down elsewhere.
As video grows even more popular, video hosting will become an absolute necessity. Marketers would create video content, which would require platform bandwidth. This platform bandwidth, upload flexibility, and watch session benefit would be provided by an online video hosting website.
Video Hosting vs Traditional Web Hosting
Video hosting and traditional web hosting serve different purposes and cater to distinct needs. Video hosting platforms, such as YouTube and Vimeo, are designed specifically for video content, offering built-in video players, video-specific analytics, and potential limitations on video length, size, or bandwidth.
On the other hand, traditional web hosting, like self-hosting on a server or using WordPress, is geared towards hosting websites and various file types, not just video. These platforms do not inherently include video players and require additional software or plugins, focusing on website traffic analytics rather than video-specific metrics.
How much does it cost?
The cost of video hosting depends on the services and provider you choose. With such a wide offer of video hosting platforms comes a wide price range. Some hosting services, such as YouTube, are completely free of charge. Others, however, can come at prices as steep as thousands of dollars a month.
The price of a video hosting service usually reflects the range of features and support offered to users. In other words, free platforms might save you some money, but you will have to be prepared to compromise on other fronts, such as the security of your content or the range of video monetization options.
So, Which Video Hosting Platform are you choosing?
Clearly, video hosting is essential for carrying out video marketing successfully. They give you the best shot at exposure through search engine rankings, make the marketing process easier, and provide your viewers with a pleasant experience.
With so many compelling advantages and minimal issues, not opting for a platform can never be a good option for any business. So, the question remains only one— which hosting platform are you going for?