Video Hosting Websites

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then a video must be worth at least 10,000. Over the past six months we’ve had more and more opportunities to include video clips as a key part of our blog content – to the point that we recently started a separate blog just to document all the video clips.

At first we used just a simple upload to the blog ISP with a download link in a post. Then, after the audioblog.com service announced a beta release of their video functions, we immediately signed up and started to include videos in some of our blogs.

Unfortunately for our wallet, audioblog.com charges for bandwidth that exceeds a set threshold. When one of our video clips was extremely popular we knew we would have to change to another provider as quickly as possible.

Google Video, our next choice, proved to have some significant drawbacks that made it hard to do what we wanted with our video clips. Our third choice, and the one we really feel good about, was youtube.com. So far we’re really happy with youtube, but it never hurts to look around.

Here’s our current list of video hosting websites:

Clipshack
VSocial
Castpost
Grouper
YouTube
Vimeo
Revver
OurMedia
GoogleVideo
DailyMotion

It will take some time to check all of them out, but we think in the long run it will be worth it.

Comments

[Mark Sigal]

I would chime in that vSocial stands above the rest. The site, which is pretty addictive, is growing like a weed, in large part because we have done a lot of work to connect the dots for the MySpace crowd, the blogosphere and the Video iPod generation.

What separates us from the other video clip sharing sites is that we enable users to actually "do something" with video clips.

So, for example, in the vSocial scheme of things, if you embed a clip on your blog, you will see a meta layer that enables you to see how this clip was tagged by vSocial members, what comments were made about it by them, and email the clip to friends in a click -- all without going to another site.

Plus we provide a tool called a video roll that enables users to tell short stories (e.g., favorite horror movies) using an amalgam of clips.

And our Blog It! feature enables Blogger and TypePad users to create and visually edit video postings to their accounts from within the vSocial service.

To get a quickie primer on this and see-touch-feel what I am talking about, check out the post that we wrote on the topic called "Short attention, short conversations and video clips"
(http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2005/10/vsocial_video_c.html). It has the embedded and video roll examples nested within the post.

Better yet, sign up for vSocial (www.vsocial.com). It's free.

Mark