Types of Video Hosting Services & Use Cases

Videos are one of the most consumed content online. YouTube reports that it registers about one billion hours of video every single day. According to industry forecasts, in 2019, video content became the most significant marketing trend and will alone take over 82 percent of all internet traffic by 2021.

With both increases in demand and consumption of content online, there is an exponential growth seen in the video content. After all, why wouldn’t it be, videos serve as a great tool to increase engagement, educate users, and to provide entertainment as well.

So, let’s say you made a video for your website. And you want to put it up on your website. Should you just upload it to your server? I’d recommend that you don’t!

Handling video hosting on your own can be difficult both technically and economically. Videos are usually much more weighty than the text contents. It eventually brings a heavy load to the server as every time your webpage loads your video loads as well. This can often overload your server and lead to website crashes.

In order to avoid such crashes, it is often advised to host your website and video on different servers. But if you are setting up your own server, it can prove to be challenging as you’d need to set up a new server. This would increase the development cost, responsibility, and maintenance as well.

But all thanks to video hosting services, as you can use other third-party video hosting services to host your videos. But again, choosing the right platform can be difficult if you do not know which service is appropriate and in which context. This article will guide you on what is Video hosting, what kind of businesses/organizations need video hosting, different options available for video hosting, and what features are essential for video hosting.

What Is Video Hosting?

Video hosting is a practice used to upload and host or store your video contents online on the servers. Users can host videos on any dedicated servers, cloud storage, or through any third-party websites. Users mainly host videos so that viewers can access the video through the internet and watch its content directly (which we usually do via YouTube). Most video hosting sites also provide a link to use it on the website, known as embed code. Companies like Google, Vimeo, Wistia, etc. use large storages to put these video contents either in public or private form.

What Kind Of Businesses Need Video Hosting Service?

For achieving your video marketing goals and video hosting for business, it is essential to know which business genre requires what kind of videos. Video content makers can make different kinds of videos based on their audience and target viewers. Due to their different requirements, they might need different services. Someone looking to host videos for everyone can opt for platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. While, if you’re looking to monetize your videos, you should consider a video hosting service that provides good video hosting features and security.

Elearning Organisation:

Elearning businesses and companies are growing these days. They produce a large amount of video content that is either pre-recorded videos or live videos that are processed and stored simultaneously in the video hosting services. Case-study videos, demo videos, and recorded webinars are some other types of videos that education companies and businesses use.

Educational Institutes and corporate training:

Educational Institutes, colleges, and organizations also prepare lecture videos and tutorial videos that they need to upload on their institute or university server. By doing this, the server becomes heavy, and the response time increases accordingly. So, hosting those tutorial and lecture series on third-party websites make it easy to host and manage.

Entertainment Businesses:

Movies, web series, audio-visual contents use promo videos (trailers or hypes), as well as full-fledged content to entertain the viewers and earn profit from it. Promo videos and trailers work well for virtual conferences, movie or tv-series releases, big-events, etc. Big story short, this showcases an overall storyline or details about the content. Whether it is large video content or a trailer/teaser, they need hosting solutions.

Product Marketing Videos:

Demo videos, explainer videos, and How-To videos are common types of video content used in marketing to showcase the product and its usefulness. This eases customers and viewers into understanding the essence of the product and hikes marketing possibilities.

Personal Videos are the most popular and widely accepted form of videos that the individual uses to express certain content or discuss a particular topic. YouTube is, by far, the most used third-party video hosting and video content delivery system for sharing personal video content in the form of channels.

Different Video Hosting Services

For achieving your target through video content, you need a video hosting service for business. There are different ways to host your video content.

SaaS Video Hosting:

Video hosting for business becomes easy, secure, and full of utilities if you opt for paid video hosting services like Vimeo, VdoCipher, etc. They offer 100 percent assurance against video-piracy concerning other contenders in the world using DRM Video Encryption. Users can also enjoy utilities, and features like setting viewers’ permission, collaboration in private, and the video content put on those platforms are not for sale. These video hosting services also take care of content privacy.

On-Premise Hosting:

Companies and enterprises buy their dedicated servers for video hosting for business. Through this approach, the company incurs the cost of servers, and its maintenance resides upon the company. It is a costly choice, but if content security is a priority to you, then this is a trustworthy choice. It is also known as on-premise video hosting. You can store and share private content through this approach. It can be really challenging as well, if you don’t have the right means, it’s better not to host your own videos.

Hosting on popular cloud servers like Amazon:

Video hosting services for business, corporates, marketing, or individual purpose is perhaps the most fantastic technological modernization of the 21st century. Its fast-growing adoption and craze into the mainstream caught the eyes of cloud service providers. Online video-hosting services provide a platform that allows users to upload, share videos, or live stream their video to the internet. AWS is one of the best platforms to provide video hosting services. Almost one million users from top enterprises like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, etc. are using AWS to store video content and video hosting services.

Hosting on a hybrid cloud:

In a hybrid video hosting model, you can host your videos by using a combination of one private and one public cloud. Let’s say you’re an e-learning business, which provides both free and paid content to your users. You can host your paid videos using a secure video hosting service or on-premise with added security. While free videos can be hosted through an open platform such as Youtube, which doesn’t need any security.

This can help you manage your storage costs easily as you won’t have to pay for any cost incurred by the free videos. While at the same time ensuring the protection of your paid videos.

YouTube:

YouTube is the most popular and largest video hosting website, with 1.9 billion users logged-in and remains active on the website every month. It is a free video-hosting solution that allows you to host the public as well as private videos. There are both copyright algorithm checks and security for the content you upload on YouTube. There is no data storage limit to bandwidth, and therefore, users can upload a single video of up to 128 gigabytes. But it has a few drawbacks. There will be continuous and random ads that will pop up in between. Also, video content on such websites does not preserve privacy and proper security. Hence, organizations do not prefer to use YouTube and other free platforms to share confidential video content.

Features To Look For In Video Hosting Services

When it comes to conducting online business, there are different approaches to highlight your business verticals to your customers. Video content is one such powerful tool. But it is equally essential to check (from the above five hosting options) certain features before choosing any. Here is the list of features that a video hosting service must contain.

Handling Scalability:

You might have seen a million views within five hours on YouTube. The video hosting services must have the ability to handle thousands to millions of user access/view requests at a time. If you are sharing video content as public, there is a possibility that tens of thousands of viewers might watch that content. So, it is very crucial to handle scalability in terms of viewing the content.

Video Protection:

It is another essential factor that one must keep in mind while choosing video hosting services. Video protection makes sure that organizations can host videos for either private purposes or for paid videos. If you are planning to monetize your content, it is imperative to take measures against video piracy.

A multi DRM based video encryption can ensure that your videos are being protected from any such behavior. Make sure that widevine DRM and Fairplay DRM are part of your multi DRM strategy as they are currently the most widely used DRM available rn. Using a DRM can work wonders, plus other security features such a screen recording protection and dynamic watermarking can be quite helpful.

Geographical location:

The location should be another priority as the geographical location of the server containing the video content can affect the content and its essence. It is because most applications check the IP address of the web-server serving the video, and this might affect as per language or in accessing the content. A good CDN can play a vital role in order to ensure that your users can seamlessly stream their videos across the globe regardless of their geographical location.

Speed of video playback:

Everything boils down to this one common and most important factor. It is essential to check how good and smooth the video can stream and the speed of delivering content. Also, one must check the video playback features. If you have opted for a lower budget plan, 1080p is okay, but a service with a higher budget should not support anything lesser than Ultra-HD or more.

Analytics, Integrations, Plugins & APIs :

The video hosting services should offer other features like video analytics, custom thumbnail, dashboard, plugins & APIs for easy integration, etc.

Summing It Up!

Good video hosting can be crucial to take your video platform to the next level. You want a solution that is scalable and provides you ample features to support.

Self hosting videos are a big no unless you have adequate infrastructure and team to support it. It is wise to use platforms like youtube in case your content is free. Otherwise, it is always good to go for a good video hosting service. Just make sure it provides ample security features such as DRM encryption, Screen recording prevention, and Dynamic watermarking.