If you create a lot of videos, you’re going to want to have a great video hosting company to show off your talent.
However, not everyone has the same needs. I’ve compiled a list for you to help you compare the features of some of the sites available to host your video.
Video hosting options
Wistia – Wistia provides professional video hosting with amazing viewer analytics, HD video delivery, and marketing tools to help understand your visitors.
However, Wistia is also a paid-for platform.
So with many benefits there comes a cost.
No surprise there.
But it is a really popular choice for those looking to get more control over the video player on their website.
Wistia features include:
- Calls to action and email collectors
- Video heatmaps & viewing trends
- Easy embedding and sharing
- Works on every device
- HD bandwidth detection
- You can customize your player
- Engagement graphs
- Add thumbnails to your email campaigns
- Viewer history tracking
- and more
Amazon s3 – Amazon? Don’t they sell books and everything else under the sun.
Yes, yes they do. But they also offer cloud hosting.
In fact, many a client uses Amazon to host their website.
One of the beautiful things about Amazon is that you only pay for the amount of storage you use.
There is also no minimum fee and no setup cost. Now that’s a deal, right?
Amazon S3 features include:
- Provides durable infrastructure to store important data and is designed for durability.
- Allows you to store large amounts of data at a very low cost.
- Amazon S3 Standard is designed for up to 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
- Supports data transfer over SSL and automatic encryption of your data once it is uploaded.
- You can store as much data as you want and access it when needed.
- Scale-up and down as required, dramatically increasing business agility.
- Send Event Notifications.
- supports multi-part uploads to help maximize network throughput and resiliency.
- Amazon S3 is integrated with Amazon CloudFront, which distributes content to end-users with high data transfer speeds.
- Has multiple ways to help you transfer large amounts of data into and out of the cloud.
Vimeo – Vimeo actually has a lot of features and benefits with its Pro version.
They have four subscription levels including free, Pro, Plus, and Business.
If you plan on uploading any type of commercial content at all you’ll have to use the Pro version but it does come with a lot of perks.
Vimeo features include (depending on your subscription level):
- 500MB-20GB of storage per week
- Unlimited bandwidth in the player
- Different privacy levels based on your subscription. The private is great if you have any paid-for content that you need to keep private. Inducing password protection
- Basic to super-advanced support – really great support at that.
- Statistics
- Customization
- Ad-free
- Option to sell your videos
- Video school and tutorials
Vimeo is actually our platform of choice for hosting our training videos in our membership sites.
YouTube – Ok so everyone knows about YouTube and in fact, more people use YouTube than any other video site.
But there are some options that you may not know about.
YouTube features include:
- Completely free to host all your videos
- Playlists to organize your videos (and even add other people’s videos in your playlist if you choose to)
- Closed captions for those who have a hearing impairment or wish to watch your video with no sound but see the text onscreen
- Option to have your video as unlisted and only those with the link can view it
- Option to have your video unlisted and only those you designate can view it
- iCards which embeds external links in your video viewable on all devices
- Annotations that allow you to place an external link anywhere in the video but are not viewable on mobile devices
- Ability to monetize your channel and videos
- Custom thumbnail options for your videos
- Detailed analytics
Techsmith’s Screencast – I love Screencast hosting from Techsmith.
I use it every single day.
I use Snagit as my screencasting tool of choice and I’m able to automatically send all my screencasts to my Screencast.com account.
Benefits of Techsmith/Screencast include:
- Works seamlessly with Jing, Snagit, and Camtasia
- 2GB of storage and monthly bandwidth with the free plan
- 25GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth with the Pro version
- Links to share videos easily
- Downloadable videos
- Password protection option
- Ability to embed video
- Free option and affordable Pro option
- Free tech support
- Notification when you are running out of room and need to clear out files on your account
Cincopa – I had not checked into Cincopa before writing this blog but as I was looking for more video hosting options, this one has impressive features so I wanted to include it.
It actually allows for more than just video hosting, including images, slideshare, music, and podcasts.
Definitely worth looking into.
Cincopa’s features include:
- Easy Upload & Embedment – Upload any video format file to your Cincopa private video hosting service and embed it anywhere you want in less than a minute.
- Fast & Reliable Video Cloud – Content Delivery Network (CDN) is designed to ensure the highest delivery speed possible.
- Fully Responsive & Scalable – Your media files are optimized for all browsers, screens and mobile devices.
- Customizable Video Streaming Players – Customize the player’s skin and functions as you wish; change sizes, colors, controls, layout and more.
- Detailed analytic reports.
- You may upload your media files from different sources including your portable devices, desktop, directly from your web camera, or from various web URLs.
- Security – Cincopa respects your privacy and offers you a domain lock feature.
- 30 day free trial
- Ads FREE
- Vast distribution – Display your video player through hundreds of social channels, mail systems and any HTML or CMS based sites via a click of a button.
SproutVideo – This is another video hosting site that we recently came across.
After reviewing SproutVideo, I really wanted to include this as they have several features that are super impressive.
I highly recommend you check this one out.
SproutVideos’s features include:
- Security – We have multiple privacy settings – including private, password, and login protected – available for when you don’t want your video to go viral.
- Signed embed code – Set an expiration time for your embed code, ensuring that the embed code cannot be shared on another site.
- IP Address Restriction – Restrict video access to connections coming from a specific ip address, network, or block of IP addresses.
- Monitor activity – Impressions, engagement, IP address, plays, locations and more
- Post-play call to action – Guide your viewers after your video has finished with customizable post-play calls to action. Add links, images, forms, or any HTML you’d like.
- Email capture – Easily add an email collection form to build your contact list.
- Build a website with your video content – Select one of our free themes and customize it to match your branding or to create a stunning new look for your video site.
- CDN delivery – We use a global content distribution network to ensure the best video playback possible everywhere.
- Custom players – Every time you embed a video, you can totally change the appearance and behavior of our player. Change the colors, hide controls, loop your video, change the size, save time with custom player presets, and more.
- Free trial – You can get complete access to all our features for 14 days.
If you use another video hosting site, please add that in the comments below and let us know what you love most about it.
Need help with your video marketing needs? Contact us today to discuss a plan.
