What is the difference between using a video service and and self-hosting your own video?
Using a Video Service involves uploading a video file to a service like YouTube, Daily Motion or Vimeo. Your viewer the watch your 'channel' on the website of the service. The hard work of delivering the video file is done by the video host’s servers, as opposed to your own server where your website is hosted.
Self-hosting a video means that you upload the video file to your site. This process varies depending on the website system you are using. You may self-host your videos on the webspace where you have your website or may store video files on an external storage space like Amazon cloud or Archive.org.
To explore the advantages, technical and otherwise, to hosting your own video content, we compare self hosting to the most popular video sharing site YouTube. While other similar services exist their conditions are often very similar.
No Length Limits: You don't have the default length limit of 15 minutes.
No Random Takedowns: When YouTube removes one of your videos (a takedown) the process is often quite random and often difficult sometimes to reverse. Hosting your own video allows you to keep your video online and deal with any legal issues directly.
Less Blocking: Many companies and some countries block YouTube viewing. You may be able to avoid this blanket blocking.
No Adverts: YouTube has 'pre-roll' ads, overlay ads, banner ads and more ads in "related videos", "promoted videos". Self-hosting avoids this distraction from your message.
Choice of Images and Design: Self-hosting gives you a lot of flexibility when choosing how your video content is displayed. From choosing image thumbnails to the layout of your page there are many limitations to what YouTube and similar sites offer.
Show Video in Context: The freedom to be able to display your videos in the context of other video content and other contextualising information is a huge advantage. You can design your pages in a way to offer additional resources including text, audio, and information about relevant campaigns and supporting organisations.
No Shutdowns: YouTube can shutdown or suspend your account at any time and there is limited customer service to be able to dispute or reverse this decision.
Membership or Restricting Viewers: You may have very legitimate reasons to restrict viewing of certain videos. Self-hosting allows you to do this more flexibly than any of the limited options offered by YouTube and similar services.
Bandwidth Costs and Limits: YouTube and similar services are free and remain so even if your video is very popular. When you are self-hosting content you will have to pay for the bandwidth (data transfer) for a sucessful video this could be significant. Also if your self-hosted video is very popular then your webserver may not be able to deal with this increased use of bandwidth and you may get feedback that your video is not viewable.
Audience Searchability: Good Search Engine Optimisation can make your video content visible for web searches. However, YouTube itself is the second most popular search engine.
Multiple Encoding of Videos: To effectively distribute your video to a wide range of different devices and users with varying internet connections it is advised to encode your videos to different resolutions and formats. While a service like YouTube takes care of this aspect this is a tricky to implement if you are self hosting your videos.
Limited Embedding Options: YouTube have done a lot of work to allow you to make it easy for users to embed videos in blogs and social media outlets. You can also alter the player dimensions and to embed playlists, entire channels. This is a significant piece of work to replicate with when your are self-hosting video.
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