For some time now, the advice on storage and hosting for Internet video has consisted largely of, “YouTube is free, so store all your videos on YouTube and embed them from YouTube onto your site.”

Now I am hearing video “gurus” say, “If you embed your videos from You Tube, people will think you don’t know what you’re doing!”

So what gives?  Why the drastic change?

First of all, I do not think it is true that the majority of people will assume you don’t know what you’re doing if you host your videos on YouTube.   Granted the early adopter folks are drifting away from You Tube but the majority is still there.

Aficionados believe that You Tube quality is weak and they do not like the file size and time limits imposed by You Tube.  They also don’t like having the You Tube player on their sites, mostly because it pops up with “related videos” when your video is finished.  That makes it easy for your website’s audience to abandon you for other You Tube videos.  These complaints are perfectly valid.  However it is also true that You Tube by far still has the most traffic, so posting your video on You Tube automatically exposes you to a huge potential audience.

As online video grows, more video hosting options become available.  Viddler is an extremely popular alternative.  Veeple is also a great solution and allows you all kinds of cool ways to make your videos clickable for better monetization.

Another popular alternative to You Tube is the Amazon S3 account services.  There are many reasons to consider an Amazon S3 account.

Amazon created S3 because they believe that “quality Internet-based storage should be taken for granted.”   Sounds like a great premise to me!

S3 stands for “Simple Storage Service.”  Amazon developed it to be not only simple, but very inexpensive as well.  They give you virtually unlimited storage and have multiple data centers to help ensure the storage is safe and reliable.  (It’s really not that simple though, unless you know multiple computer languages. Read this post for more information about how to overcome that problem.)

Amazon S3 uses a system where you only pay for the storage and bandwidth that you actually use.  There are no upfront fees.  There are also no minimum fees or overuse fees.

To store files, Amazon S3 fees begin at 15 cents per gigabyte per month.  If you get over 50 terabytes of storage, the fees start to go down per byte.

To transmit files (bandwidth) S3 charges range from 10 to 18 cents per gig, depending on overall usage.

Fees are slightly higher for storage and bandwidth usage in Europe.

Amazon.com has been a leading pioneer on the Internet since its inception.   The S3 storage service seems mighty ambitious to me.  Reading though their service specs I got the impression that they want to become to online file storage what Wal Mart is to retail.

Nothing wrong with that.  I have an S3 account and recommend that you look into one as well.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips

Lorraine Grula

Internet Video Gal

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2. Online Video Viewers: Not Very Patient!
3. The World’s Easiest Way to Edit & Produce a Video for the Web
4. Online Video Marketing: Monetizing Your Video
5. Online Video Production: Aspect Ratio, 16×9 and 3×4