Using videos to promote services

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

+1 for JWplayer

..and I have Youtube because?

[Vectis]

..and I have Youtube because?

... because that was the most appropriate solution at the time

There's a fair bit of work to make the change, and a licence fee, for no real gain other than losing the youtube overlay.

If you want to delve deeper drop me an email

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

There's a fair bit of work to make the change

I thought there might be...

I'm not keen on having Youtube video on my site but you did say something about video on your actual site taking a lot of resources at the time?

[Shaun]

There's a fair bit of work to make the change, and a licence fee, for no real gain other than losing the youtube overlay.

....and the fact that videos hosted away from youtube won't have ads. That was the biggest plus point for me. It just feels a little bit more professional not using YouTube (in my humble opinion).

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

....and the fact that videos hosted away from youtube won't have ads. That was the biggest plus point for me.

And looks a bit more professional?

[Shaun]

And looks a bit more professional?

See my edit above.....at the same as you posted.

great minds eh!

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

See my edit above.....at the same as you posted.

great minds eh!

You must have edited twice as I saw your comment and then it disappeared and then re-appeared!

[Happy Jack]

Vimeo Plus may be something that appeals to someone. I would imagine those with a reasonable amount of HD content and promotional material could probably justify the expense.

http://vimeo.com/plus

[Shaun]

You must have edited twice as I saw your comment and then it disappeared and then re-appeared!

You know me. Trigger happy.

[Marc J]

...no real gain other than losing the youtube overlay.

....and the fact that videos hosted away from youtube won't have ads. That was the biggest plus point for me. It just feels a little bit more professional not using YouTube (in my humble opinion).

In days gone by there was a certain "stigma" attached to using Youtube for video on your own site, but that has more or less disappeared as more and more big companies use it. Now (imho) the advantages in using your own video solution are: -

1) No YT overlay.
2) No ads over the video.
3) Clicking on your video doesn't take the visitor to youtube, which will then list similar videos (by other people, perhaps competitors), ads, and any videos you uploaded of aunty Doris singing "Crazy" on the Karaoke or your kid's first steps.
4) Looks more professional.
5) If your video contains copyrighted material, Youtube may do an audio substitution on it. I'm not suggesting that using your own video solution is a way to flout copyright law - but you can easily buy a license for your own site if you need to.

I'm not keen on having Youtube video on my site but you did say something about video on your actual site taking a lot of resources at the time?

The downsides to using your own video solution are: -

1) You might have to purchase a software license for the player you choose.
2) Technically more difficult to implement than simple Youtube embed code.
3) You have to encode your videos correctly. Youtube takes care of all this when you upload video, it accepts a wide array of formats without any problems and encodes them for you. When doing this yourself you have to worry about the quality Vs file size tradeoff, as well as what format / codec to use, especially if you want it to be both Flash and HTML5 compatible.
4) Video is resource hungry, in both disk space and bandwidth. But if you farm this out (see post #29) that's easily overcome.