How to present videos like a pro

It is a good question - how do you present your videos like a professional? There are different ways of presenting videos. You could do it by hosting the video on your own server. Alternative would be to do what many do, and that is to use some free streaming service. Another option is to go with a paid service to help with the same.

Here we will cover the benefits and downfalls of each category so that you can prepare yourself and select the best option for you.

Adding videos to your own server

This is definitely the easiest one to do. At first glance it looks like all you have to do is to upload your video and that is it.

What most people forget about is the download limits that your website might have. You might see that 1 video you added as just 10mb of space. However if you have 100 visitors viewing that single video that is immediately 10 * 100. So there goes 1 gigabyte of downstream and you are not even counting the other assets and content on your pages.

Unfortunately this can sometimes present itself as an additional charge. Often also at a higher rate when you get info about it from your host. This of course depends on many things however we did not even get to the other important parts of any video hosting. The preview, the experience and all the things that might not be obvious at the first glace. All of these things are however immediately offered by services specialized in this, even free ones.

Adding videos to a free service

Hands down the most popular options you will see when someone decides to add video to their website or app is to use YouTube. It is a free service, fast servers and has some options for you to choose from.

YouTube and other such free services like Vimeo or Wistia will also offer you different ways how you can add the video to your website.

Now with that said, the downfall of such free services is that you often do not really have a lot of options. Maybe better to say it as enough of options. For example maybe the videos play embedded with fullscreen option as disabled.

On first look options like that look OK, something we can live with. However let us look more into fullscreen option. It might be disabled for playback on your website yet it will have the option to take someone to YouTube to see it in fullscreen.

Now this is still OK, especially if you are YouTube as the person viewing the video can continue watching some other videos. As a professional, a service owner that is a no-no.

It does not matter what the service is really, it is things like that which take your visitor from your pages and to some other page or service. Ideally they should stay on your website until they become leads or fulfill the goals that you set.

Paid video hosting

Enter paid video hosting. It is true that there are some good and free things in the world. We all like them and welcome them in our life. Of course when you want to do things as a pro you do need to think about additional things.

Of course, you can always leave that thinking to someone else. This is where the paid video hosting comes into play. Now, we offer this, so we will just quickly say that we are award winning service for the media API and have ton of experience and options for developers. There, we said it. Now with that out of the way, we can focus on the additional details that can help you find what you are after and why paid video hosting is the best option for you.

This type of video hosting generally puts you into a place where you can directly impact how the videos are presented and made available to your visitors and customers. You can play the videos within your pages and native apps without them going anywhere else. Of course unless you want them to go there.

The other benefit is not that clear however it is more important than anything else. That is the ownership and authorship of your data. This can depend from video host to video host, however with Ziggeo the owner and author of all media is You.

Now we are all great with examples, so let us try and see it through one. Imagine going to a car repair shop and they ask you to leave your car there. Sounds all good. What if they tell you that this is their car as you do it? Well this is what free video hosting is all about and what is case with some non free video host options. What you bring to Ziggeo it is yours to take away with same rights as you had before.

Summary

Now there are actually many different reasons why you should stay away from free services and instead go with a paid video hosting if you want to look like a pro. We cover this in quick bullet-points below.

Paid hosting is Ad Free, or you control the ads
Free video services often have a “recommended videos” option. You have no control what is the next or recommended content. You don’t want your video to be followed by your competitor's awesome introduction video, some political, sexual or discriminatory video.
Frequently the video you upload to these free services is no longer yours (you release all authorship rights).
Storage and bandwidth is very limited in Vimeo and other free plans. Vimeo in particular has a cap of 500MB per week of upload space, up to 5GB total account storage.
Many times you don’t have control over the styles or branding used in your videos with free services.
With free services you are not asked before they make some change to the player shown on your page.
Ziggeo offers you the option to add your brand (watermark) on videos, and only show that watermark. Other free services add their branding which you can't hide.
If you host your videos to your own website (for example in a WordPress site, using GoDaddy), sometimes these videos won’t stream as well as in a dedicated server like Ziggeo. You might also have to upgrade to another hosting plan if the video is played a lot and you exceed your bandwidth limits.

Hopefully this helps you see what might work for you. Of course if you have any questions or comments please send an email to support@ziggeo.com