Sharing Your Stuff with the World

Video production and sharing used to be a real crapshoot.It was a proposition that required high-end tools, intimate knowledge of codecs and file formats, and access to streaming servers.

Things have since simplified quite a lot. MP4 is now a nearly universal format, one that is supported by every video player and service. Some softwares produce the media file by itself, others pair it with player files that include captions, special controllers, and interactive elements. But the content itself is always MP4.

An MP4 video offers something called progressive download, meaning that you can start viewing it before it has finished downloading to your computer. True video streaming is now only necessary when broadcasting live events.

So once we have our files, where do we put them so that people can view them? Screencasts and other video need to be hosted online somewhere.

For hosting, here are your best options:

Self-hosting. Take your produced video files, and throw them up your web server. Done. Just keep in mind that you’ll need adequate player files in order to ensure a good viewing experience for the user.

The Camtasia line of products have the option to include their SmartPlayer technology, letting you include cool, interactive stuff like a table of contents, clickable hotspots, closed captions, and quizzing.

Now, your web hosting provider will usually place some sort of limits on your bandwidth based on your hosting plan. Rather than placing that burden on the hosting provider of my main web site, I utilize Amazon S3. Its bandwidth is incredibly cheap, and because of its worldwide distribution, delivers rapid speed everywhere in the world. Especially if you have long videos (20+ minutes) that are likely to be viewed by many, many people, this is a good way to go.

Screencast.com. This is a video hosting service run by TechSmith, the company that makes Camtasia. They offer a free account with limited storage and bandwidth, and if you use Camtasia Studio or Camtasia Mac, there’s no reason not to sign up. It’s the only video hosting service that can make use of the interactive features of the TechSmith SmartPlayer.

They also offer a pro version of the service with more storage, bandwidth, and other features for ten bucks a month. While I don’t personally use it for hosting my professional videos, its easy sharing capabilities make a great repository for my screenshots, client video drafts. and other informal screencasts I’m cobbling together for a very limited audience.

Wistia. This hosting solution is ideal for marketers who like to measure their results. Thus far, their metrics are unparalleled. You can see how many folks viewed the video all the way through, where people stopped, and the portions they re-watched.

Add captions, clickable calls-to-action, even set up a turnstile on your video, only letting people watch it after they subscribe to your mailing list.

It also includes some of the other standard niceties like captions, comments, and a social bar where people can like or retweet your video. The one downside to Wista is that it can be expensive, with monthly plans starting at $25 per month.

YouTube. It has the advantage of being free and universally popular. For this reason, almost every screencasting tool you can think of offers the ability to directly upload to it. Quality can suffer if you don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s certainly the best platform to have a video go viral (not that this happens to most of us).

A lot of folks think that hosting with Youtube is the surest way to have your videos show up in Google’s search results, but this hasn’t been my experience. I since plenty of videos hosting with other services, and even self-hosted vids, pop up on page one of Google.

Youtube can be a decent way of building a following when people subscribe to your channel. In that sense, it’s a good marketing tool, though it does require that people that people regularly take the initiative to visit your channel.

Screencast hosting doesn’t have to be a chore. No matter which solution you pick, the key is to get busy making and uploading some screencasts!