Video Q & A: Where Should I Host My Video?
Question: Where Should I Host My Video?
Answer:
In my time at PEG, even we have been a little undecided on what platform is the best place to host a video.
Consider The Purpose
We decide where a video should be hosted based on what the purpose of the video is. The use case we have experimented most with is presenting a video to a client. When I first started at PEG we would always provide a Vimeo link, but now we use an awesome service called Frame.io. It allows clients to comment on every frame of a video. They can also draw on each frame to be sure they are describing their edits in an easy to understand format. We love it! Clients are able to provide feedback without listing out time codes and instead of trying to describe something they want removed, they can actually circle it! But to get to that point we had to be open to new platforms. We might still be sending out Vimeo links today if we never explored the possibilities of other places to host video.
One-Off Video vs. Starting a Channel
So, to really get into where you should host your video, I have to emphasize that it really depends on the purpose and the intended audience. If you are someone who put together a fun vacation recap and you want to show it to all of your friends, it might be easiest to let it live on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and call it a day. But if you think you might build a collection of family videos and want them all to be in one place, then you should create a YouTube or Vimeo channel and then link your videos to any social channels you want! That way they can all be organized in one place. You can even create playlists to display the videos by category or series. It's pretty easy. We use a plan like this when linking our internal videos to our websites, because we know there is going to be A LOT of videos. Having them live in one place lets us track the views accurately and allows us to enter in all of the info and descriptions in one place. Then we just use the Embed URL on the back end of our sites and it links right to our account.
YouTube vs. Vimeo
If you are thinking about this from a business standpoint, I have to recommend using Vimeo over YouTube for embedding into sites. Vimeo is a premium hosting service, which means it will cost some money monthly and it will still limit you depending on how much you pay. But the reason I think it is worth the money is that you can customize the embedded video player to match your brand and you can even remove any parts of it that you don’t want to see. 
This is not an option with YouTube embedded videos, they will always have the YouTube branding and color scheme. If you don’t mind that, feel free to just embed from there. The price points for Vimeo aren’t bad for what you get though. Here is a link to their pricing and the things you get per price point.
Business vs. Individual
A lot of what I have said has targeted more of the business side of hosting, but if you are just an individual with a bunch of family clips or a lot of cool video games recordings you can easily take advantage of these sites as well. You don’t have to only host things you make on a social media platform, creating a YouTube channel is easy (and FREE). You can also use parts of Vimeo for free as well. So don't be afraid to play around. These platforms can help keep your video content easily viewable by whoever you want to see it. If you plan on producing a good number of videos you should definitely familiarize yourself with one of these platforms so you can stay organized and share your work!
