Making a fantastic ScreenFlow is only half the challenge. The other half is getting people to watch it! I post the videos for this blog on our website server (which uses Limelight), and also on YouTube. But YouTube restricts video length to 10:59 minutes, which unfortunately, is not sufficient for some screencasters- especially those in education or training. Additionally, some small businesses or professional screencasters want something that appears more professional than YouTube for presenting their products or working through the client-approval process.
There has been some discussion on our forum about this, so I thought I’d bring it up here for further investigation and discussion.
Here is a list and brief comparison of some of the more popular video sharing sites:
The site supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page.
- Usage: strictly for noncommercial use
- Max size: 500 mb/week
- Max Length: unlimited
- Site views per day: 1,000,000
This site emphasizes original, episodic content. In other words, the service is designed to host content that you have created yourself, ideally as part of a regularly-updated ‘show’. They have integration with YouTube, Itunes, Vimeo, MySpaceTV, Tivo, and many more services, which allows you to “syndicate” your “show” to these platforms from your Blip.tv account.
- Usage: They discourage videos that have the sole purpose of advertising a particular product or service that,” in the judgment of Blip.tv, does not otherwise have redeeming value to the community.”
- Max size: 1024 MB
- Max Length: ?
Dailymotion contains UGC similar to YouTube. It allows users to browse and upload videos by searching tags, channels or user-created groups.
- Usage: General
- Max size: 1024 MB
- Max length: 20 min
- Views per day: ~60,000,000
With a focus on helping you build your brand.
- Usage: personal, non-business – a paid account for business purposes
- Max size: 500 MB
- Max length: no limit
Craig Seeman, who moderates our forum discussions says he actually uses the Creative Cow forums to post some of his video tutorials. Cow allows some odd (non video) frame sizes unlike YouTube or Vimeo, and they allow any members (not just moderators) to post videos there whether they be demo reels or tutorials. The question is finding the right/appropriate category, because currently there is not a ScreenFlow discussion forum there.
Niche-specific
There are also several video sharing sites that serve specific niche target audiences, or are regionally specific. If your videos fall into that category, these might be worth checking out:
- EngageMedia: social justice & environmental issues in the Asia Pacific
- Break.com: 18-35 year old males
- Tudou and Youku: The largest video sharing sites in China
- Globo video: connected with Brazil’s largest TV network
Paid services
Many of the sites listed above offer a paid upgrade service that enables either more bandwidth or customized players or other features. There are also services that only offer a paid-only service such as:
- SmugMug: TV clarity videos on the internet
- EasyVideoPlayer: Software that allows you to share your videos. It uses Amazon S3 as the hosting platform.
What do you use?
I’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with this. This is just a brief comparison of some of the sites out there, but there are many more. In fact, you can find a comparison matrix on Wikipedia that is very helpful.
What I’d like to know is what all you ScreenFlow users are using now. Please share your comment below, and let us know what you’re using, and what features you like about it.
Dailymotion allow you to post a video longuer than 20minutes but they need to validat it the first time and you become a “motionmaker”.
(sorry for my english, Matt from France)
I use Vimeo plus for posting videos. Most of my ScreenFlow content is for a membership site so it is private which is one of the reasons I use the plus version of Vimeo. It gives you the ability protect the content in a couple of ways, one specific website up to an unlimited number of websites controlled with url management. It is also possible to make your videos private on Vimeo. YouTube allows for private content but you only get like 25 views for a private video on YouTube.
Plus the cost of Vimeo $59 a year is nothing for what you get!
Another plus, Vimeo is not as saturated as say YouTube or some of the others that have been around much longer.
You might find Vimeo a negative if you need more then 5GBs of upload space a week.
I do recommend using more then one of these sources for posting your video content…Be Viral don’t limit yourself…post to multiple locations with one upload through TubeMogul.
Godd luck!
-Chris
Thanks for your input @chrisegg,
Sounds like Vimeo works well for your purposes. Are you uploading any promotional or strictly commercial videos there? I’ve heard that they can be very strict about not allowing this. Perhaps that only applies to public-accessible videos.
I really like Viddler. Videos on the sites load extremely quickly, even in HD. I also like their custom branding options.
Does anyone else have concerns with how some of the hosting companies define “commercial content.”
To me, this seems very vague and can put your videos at risk. It appears they can cut you off at anytime based upon a judgement call.
I’m willing to pay for hosting. I’ve used Blip.tv and am even considering upgrading again. But even with the “pro” level of service, they disallow commercial content. Maybe Vimeo is better but I’m not sure.
And with the recent demise of Veoh, these 3rd party hosting platforms have me concerned. Are they making money? What happens if they fold? What happens to our videos then?
I can’t help but think the better long term solution is to self host but one good Digg and your shared server is toast. So is Amazon S3 really the way to go?
Sorry for so many questions here. I don’t have the answers yet myself. But I’m trying to figure it all out.
Hmm, might make a good ‘cast when I’m through.
HI Scott, I agree with you about the vague definition of “commercial content”. In fact, some platforms I looked at (Blip.tv immediately comes to mind) openly stated in their usage policies that ‘based on their sole judgement’ they can decide to remove your videos or essentially deem your material inappropriate. Vimeo is also very strict about not allowing promotional content.
I’d love to hear from others about their experience with Amazon S3.
And Scott, please keep us posted as you work through your own questions and discoveries.
thanks for your input, LYNN
I heard so much negative reports about Amazon S3 uploading and administration of the videos that I avoided getting an account until along came EasyVideoPlayer. This software is a one-time install that bridges your interaction with S3 down to, well, zilch.
So lately I have been using that, with a new S3 account for private, subscriber videos – and since my recent productions are in HD and a larger viewer screen this works well, and I think it’s my choice for the near future anyway.
I also have previously hosted subscriber videos at WebVideoZone and they have been reliable and flexible with some clever marketing features built in, like redirects and branding etc. I have a LOT of videos hosted there, and will probably compare them with S3 after a few months of service because WebVideoZone is on the expensive side.
All of the other public video hosts, IMHO should be used to get traffic (diect or SEO) to your sites for conversions into an email stream or sales page.
I use Amazon S3 and host the actual video on my blog utilizing JW Player as the viewer. So far I have not had any issues, and am in complete control of my content.
In the University System of Georgia (USG), we started developing our own podcasting server in 2004 and have continued to improve and expand it ever since. At first, podcasting was primarily about mp3 audio files but video podcasting has taken the lead recently. We view screencasting as a specialized form of video.
In podcasting, media is organized as “channels” which are composed of individual files called episodes. Podcast channels are described by an XML file that follows the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format. With the address to a podcast channel, one can subscribe to it using an aggregator such as the iTunes application.
That’s the basic model that we started with but teaching faculty wanted to be able to use their podcast episodes in other ways as well so we started adding various other ways for audiences to consume educational media. Here’s a web page that illustrates some of the more popular of these publishing options:
http://hercules.gcsu.edu/%7Eflowney/USG_PCS/index.html
This web-based server makes all of these options very easy to use by generating code that faculty copy from the server and paste into a web page or a content page in our Learning Management System (Blackboard Vista) or create an RSS Tab in an iTunes U course.
One can share an entire channel or individual episodes and it’s all done with copy and paste.
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