Website Video Hosting Services

Putting video on the web
There are a number of free options for uploading and hosting video on the web. The common denominator for all free services is that their branding will appear when the video is viewed, whether from their website or any webpage that it's posted on. But in exchange they provide free hosting of the file, automatic conversion to the proper size and format, and a snippet of pre-formatted HTML code that can be placed on any webpage to display the video. Some of these services even include video editing tools that allow trimming, cutting, and arranging clips, as well as adding transitions and titling.

If using these free services is not a professional enough option, there are other online services (not free) that provide hosting and do not place third party branding in the video or video player. I'll mention a couple after describing the free online options for digital video.

Free web-based video hosting, streaming, and player services

YouTube - YouTube is clearly the front runner in video upload and hosting. All of the sites were discussing. There are pretty similar in their use and function. YouTube had a nice feature that most others don't--it showed an upload progress bar. This is handy because when uploading large video files it can take several minutes and it's nice to see how far an upload has to go and confirm that the file is, in fact, still going up.

Google Video - Google video is very similar to YouTube. But of all the third party branded players, the branding on Google's player is the least obtrusive. They simply place a button in the bottom right of the player that will click over to the Google video site. It also has a nice playback feature in which a viewer can move the position of the playback anywhere in the video and it will re-buffer the download stream to play the video from that point. This allows viewers to skip to any part of the video without having to wait for the whole thing to download first.

Jumpcut - Jumpcut, in addition to hosting videos, is an amazing web-based video editing service. Having uploaded a file it can be trimmed, divided up, re-ordered, cut and even have transitions and titles added to it. Using Jumpcut on my sample home video I was able to easily add some music and a couple of titles using Jumpcut's editing features. By the way, just before this newsletter was published Yahoo! announced that it had purchased Jumpcut, congratulations Jumpcut!

VideoEgg - VideoEgg has some light editing capabilities and shares the progress bar feature of YouTube. Its main differentiator is that its player offers a full screen mode that when clicked opens a much larger view of the video. VideoEgg does require a piece of software to be downloaded for their upload system to work.

MotionBox - MotionBox does not currently have editing controls. But it does have a couple of unique features. Video owners can add selection points to their videos so viewers can jump to pre-determined sections of the video. Or viewers can select their own portion of the video and share just that clip with their friends. Also, while browsing MotionBox videos on their website, each clip can be scrolled even while still in the gallery icon view.

Not free, unbranded video hosting services

Adding video using these services is free and easy. However, sometimes for professionalism's sake, a branded viewer may not be appropriate. In these cases there are services that offer video hosting, streaming, and even custom Flash player development. While these are fee based services, they provide upload and hosting without a branded player. Of course Newfangled offers these services to our clients, and our new site, to be launched in October, will feature three new videos we produced this summer. They use our own Flash player. The nice thing about a custom Flash player is that it can be designed to suit any look, feature or capability requirement. It also stays nice and clean without the branding of the hosting service being added onto it.   next >