A Hybrid approach to online video embraces both external video services and using self-hosting on our own websites to try to get the best of both worlds. Some of these approaches may be very familar to you but we hope this section will also offer some new possibilities.
This is the simplest and most common hybrid approach. Rather than uploading videos to your own self-hosted space, you can embed each video that you upload into a page of your website.
In this way you can take advantage of all the categorisation, navigation, social media sharing and other techniques you use to amplify your message and stay in touch with your viewers that are present in your website with out having to worry about the technical concerns or costs of self-hosting videos.
[still of embeded video and sharing]
When uploading your videos to your own site, you may want to upload to YouTube as a back up. This could allow you to swap out popular videos to prevent your bandwidth costs from being too high, allowing you to benefit from the flexibility of self-hosting for most of your content and only using YouTube for the videos that are currenly very popular.
If you are unable to host video on your own webspace then you can decreased your dependence on any one video service by uploading video to a variety of services or repositories. You may wish to choose a variety of services with different approaches and business plans as a way of spreading the risk that they will stop
Other video sharing sites: There are many competing video sharing websites we have discussed major ones like Vimeo, YouTube. There are other like Viddler, Veoh, Dailymotion, Metacafe. If you have time and a good Internet connection then you may choose to upload you videos to two or more video sharing sites. This provides the advantage of reaching the audience of the different sites and allows you to have a more resiliant presence for your videos. If your account is suspended on one service, you can direct your viewers to another.
There exist some archive services which allow you to upload video.
Internet Archive: Their website at archive.org is a repository for openly licenced material. They a basic embeddable player, you can also 'hotlink' video files to appear on your site in your own HTML5 players. So you can use the service to stream video and for a long term archive for your video work.
WikiCommons: Wikicommons allow you to upload videos in the open WebM or Ogg Theora formats up to 500mb in size. They don't offer an embeddable player but you can 'hotlink' files to appear in your own video players. WikiCommons is linked to the WikiPedia foundation so this seems like a solid archive to put your video work.
This is something that you may want to do to acheive a universal look to the player between your uploaded videos and those that are being streamed from external sites. This allows you to empr
It is possible to create a channel player of your own content Putting an RSS feed (by keyword / tag) into JW player to create a channel player with less YT branding including aggregating YT content into your site to save work copying content
While video may be an important part of your campaign you may be partnering with many other organisations creating video which you want to display. Beyond the simple, manual methods of embedding listed above there may be more automated ways of importing feeds of these videos to appear on your website automatically.
The subject of aggregating video is covered in another section of this guide.
Some of these hybrid techniques seem very attractive as they benefit from the resources of external services while addling some of the flexibilty of display and categorisation of self hosting. However along with some of the disadvantages othere are potential pitfalls too.
Changing Interfaces: YouTube changes the interface (API) that this kind of hybrid approach might rely on. It is possible that a hybrid solution you design which pipes content into your site may become outdates and stop working.
Unreliable for Archives: If your organisation is seeking to use your online video sharing space an archive then using a free external service may not be appropriate.
There has been error in communication with Booktype server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.