What is the difference between video marketing and video hosting?
Video marketing is the usage of video content to promote your product or service. You can use a wide variety of video genres to support this marketing effort. Some of the popular genres are: explainer videos, how to videos, and testimonial videos. Video hosting is about how you deliver the video to the viewer. Unlike pictures or text on the internet videos are large files and bandwidth intensive.
You have three basic choices when it comes to video hosting.
- You can go with free hosting providers like YouTube that insert ads in and around your content,
- you can build/rent your own servers video hosting servers,
- you hire a video hosting service provider.
A popular solution is a combination of options 1 and 3 above. Using free providers for awareness and search opportunities but then channeling customers toward you privately hosted videos that can be delivered ad free and branded to drive conversion and loyalty.
Should I host my own videos?
Hosting your own videos is tricky business. It can be done and many cloud data centers can help you with setting up a nice size VM with plenty of memory and tons of internet bandwidth. So that part can get knocked out pretty quick, and if they offer a scalable solution you can just keep making the VM and storage larger. But video hosting and streaming is more than just servers, memory and bandwidth. What formats will your videos be created in and what formats will you convert them into for streaming? How many bit-rates should you support? Do you need a global content delivery network (CDN)? Do you expect lots of simultaneous viewing? Do you want to capture leads in videos? Are you prepared and staffed to monitor/test performance across devices and browsers (hint not all videos play on Apple). Hosting your own video is possible, but there are many very affordable options you should consider before doing it yourself. Check-out the following video hosting providers: TogoTiki , Brightcove, Vidyard