So is Vimeo the only way to go? or QT?

[Kristian Roque]

Hola Fellas, so I have been debating on how to encode my demos for web. As it is looking now, it seems like everyone and their mother uses Vimeo for their demo needs. Personally I am Quicktime guy. I love the H.264 codec, but I have not played around with it on Web demo work. Anybody out there NOT using Vimeo and encoding and delivering to web on Quicktime? Thanks again you guys.

[Ervin Farkas]

I am NOT using Vimeo or Youtube or anything else.

IMO the best thing is to use your own regular web server, any plain vanilla free (or spiced up not free) Flash player and encode your video to MPEG4/H.264 with a decent encoder like Handbrake. Nothing beats this combination for quality at this time.

Using Vimeo or other providers, you give up on full control, they do whatever they want with your content. I would not be surprised if one day they would simply say adios amigos and close these sites down. What will you do when you will have to replace all your content in a few days just to keep your professional image clean?

[Chris Davis]

Even though it seems like everyone uses Vimeo for that, it's a violation of their TOS. Vimeo is a community of filmmakers. Not a place to offload your video hosting costs.

I like hosting my own videos encoded using Adobe's implementation of H.264 in Flash. I use Adobe's new freeware flash video player. So far it has been working great.

[Nigel Barker]

The T&Cs for Vimeo forbid commercial use but not demo use. As noted it's meant to be a community of film makers not a video hosting service. The T&Cs seem to be widely ignored but as long as the video streaming use is not going to be a heavy load on their servers then I don't think that there is a problem. If they stopped this use of their $59.95 Plus service then they would probably lose most of their revenue. You are limited to uploading 5GB of video per week. They have a very nice embeddable video player that handles HTML5 & Flash so that the videos are can be viewed on the iPhone/iPad/iPod as well as regular web browsers like we use here www.videobyalice.com

There are a whole variety of video hosting services but I would avoid any free service if you are concerned about long term viability e.g. MotionBox recently went out of business. The high end services like BrightCove are very expensive but supply service to large corporations with bandwidth requirements that would be orders of magnitude larger than any of us would need.

The weirdly named Bits On The Run is a commercial hosting service from the developers of JW Flash Player & are reasonably priced on a sort of PPV basis. Video transcoding, management and streaming - Bits on the Run

For hosting clients videos we mostly use SmugMug Photo Sharing. Your Photos Look Better Here. who have been providing a hosting service for professional photographers for a number of years. They moved into video hosting a couple of years ago & were the first service to deliver 1080p. As a totally paid-for service their business model looks sound & it is perfectly legitimate to use their service for commercial purposes. Previously you needed the their $149.95/year Professional service for the full video service but now it is available to $59.95/year Power users. You get unlimited storage & unlimited bandwidth & can upload 1080p video up to 2GB in size & 10 minutes in length. Here is a site where we are using SmugMug Le Savannah

[Richard Lucas]

Hosting your videos on your own site is really the best way to go. You have control and retain your rights. It can even be cost competitive with the chargeable Vimeo account.

Get a free Wordpress template and use the free Flash players that are out there. They work quite well.

I'll also echo the kudos to Adobe for h.264 in Flash. I think it works better than .mp4.

[Nigel Barker]

The point about using Vimeo, SmugMug, YouTube or any other video hosting service is that they can deliver a better service than you can from your own server. Unless that is you are prepared to host you video in the Amazon cloud & always be able to offer a locally cached copy to a viewer. Small low bandwidth videos are OK on your own server but for any decent HD resolution then use a hosting service.

[Ervin Farkas]

When we say "our own server" I believe we all refer to our hosting service provider (Godaddy in my case) and not a server running in my home office. Decent service providers offer plenty of bandwidth, no need to pay for another service.

[Adam Chapman]

One of the positive reasons to have it on Vimeo is to have that external database for views to like the videos and share them beyond your website. It has been a great help for me to connect with other contacts.

Don't just close the side and back doors for access to your reel.

[Seth Bloombaum]

In the case of YouTube, they provide not only a hosting service, but access to a certain market segment. Vimeo to a slightly different segment.

Some of our client work is there, for that reason.

In Vimeo Plus, we get more predictable results and password protection for client reviews, and I don't have to write/adapt html code to get it. This was outstanding when we recently had 90+ short clips to post for internal review - used Vimeo's somewhat buggy bulk uploader, there was some brute force involved, but far superior to writing individual pages & players. Perhaps I could have adapted a flash player jukebox, but this was easier & faster.

Then we also post video on our own and clients' web servers, to control branding & image.

All these distributions have their uses...

[Andrew Smith]

The Vimeo stats engine is also excellent, giving you much more than what you would get off your own server.

Andrew

[Nigel Barker]

The player from both Vimeo & SmugMug is provided with the service & superior to JW Flash Player that seems to be used on 90% of other sites.

Video just plays better & more smoothly when streamed off Vimeo or SmugMug than when hosted on a general purpose shared web server with GoDaddy. $60/year is not much to pay to present your video in the best possible way.

[Dennis Stevens]

I've been looking for video hosting solutions where I get the most info about who is watching my videos, and if they are watching the entire video.

I'm looking at Vimeo Plus for this - to code my own page with a video player would be difficult, and I'd probably have to pay someone to do it.

It sounds like Vimeo Plus is the best video hosting site out there for this purpose.

Any other suggestions for getting viewer stats from a video hosting site?

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

I would stay away from QT because it's given me nothing but problems. Vimeo is good but nothing compares to getting your own web space and player and then encoding to your heart's content so people can see your footage the way you want them to see it.

[Dennis Stevens]

For the sake of argument, never mind if the video is displayed in exactly the bitrate it was meant for.

I'm interested in gathering info about the viewer - are they viewing the whole video, or clicking off after a few seconds?

If I was using vimeo, I'd probably embed the video on a website. I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.

I'm thinking of putting a set of related videos up, and I want to see if some are being watched the whole way through or not. I'm thinking people might click on all of them for at least a second while they are on the site. I want to know if they stop watching one after a second, and watch another one the whole way through.

[Ervin Farkas]

Originally Posted by Dennis Stevens

I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.

Good luck with that - most people (me included) click away at the first sign indicating that their personal information is being gathered.