Catching the interest of visitors, even with high-quality video material, might be difficult without a dependable video hosting platform. These platforms can provide video analytics and increase your content's online visibility. You'll know the statistics crunching behind your videos, see how many people are engaged with them, and use data insights to conceive successful marketing strategies for your productions.
What Is Video Hosting?
As proven by millions of online videos nowadays, video hosting is now mainstream practice. Video hosting simply means you may upload and save videos on a third-party website. Your viewers will be able to see the video by going straight to the host website (see our top 5, for example).
Similar to cloud-based services, video hosting platforms streamline video distribution procedures and remove the storage and bandwidth expenses linked to self-hosting.
What Is the Best Video Hosting Site?
Whether you want to exhibit educational videos, company marketing, personal blogs, or other content, these video hosting sites are your best bet. Let's start with the most popular of all, YouTube.
#1 YouTube
YouTube ranks among the most popular social networking and video hosting sites. This platform hosts videos from over a billion users. Today, many people have made millions of dollars by monetizing their YouTube videos. The videos posted on this free video hosting site are visible on Google search, giving them maximum exposure.
There's a notion that if you want to establish a name for yourself, YouTube is the ideal place to publish your viral videos online. However, it is not limited to individuals alone. Businesses may also use YouTube to reach a massive audience. These audiences will be able to see your videos on any device. You can also distribute it by embedding a video link on your blog or eCommerce site.
Speaking of sharing, you can also share specific parts of a video on YouTube. Recently, YouTube made an update to let you see which part is the Most Replayed. You may create playlists to ensure your other videos receive the same views. Then, see video analytics on your Profile to see how your channel is holding up.
YouTube may be one of the most popular video hosting sites, but it also has significant drawbacks. Several automatic "bot channels" on YouTube just duplicate your video content and publish it for free. Therefore, your videos are not completely safe from unwanted access and illegal downloading and distribution.
Key Features and Benefits
- Free video hosting
- Exposure thru Google search
- Monetize videos based on views
- Offers different ways to share videos
- Up to 12hrs of videos
- Up to 100 videos per day
- Watch on any devices
#2 Dacast
Dacast is a video hosting and live streaming platform trusted by over 300,000 professional broadcasters. It boasts industry-standard features, including a built-in video paywall that enables easy monetization. It is simple to use, thanks to extensive documentation and code samples. You can also access video analytics to help you monitor your progress.
It is also completely white-label, meaning no third-party adverts or materials that interfere with your videos. On all plan tiers, custom branding is possible. For better quality, Dacast is provided some of the world's largest leading video content delivery networks (CDNs). This provides quick, high-quality transmission with less buffering.
Above all, there are video security measures, such as HLS encryption and password-protected video functionality. There is no maximum file size or video duration, but overall file storage is determined by the plan you select. Your audience may see it on any device, just like the other platforms on this list. Or, you can set your videos live for real-time interaction.
Key Features and Benefits
- Video hosting and live streaming platform
- Easy way to monetize videos
- Easy to use and intuitive upload process
- Video analytics to track your progress
- Minimal buffering issues
- Security features
#3 Wistia
Wistia provides many customization possibilities, including the ability to incorporate your branding and logos. It offers "TV-quality" streaming and is perfect for broadcasters and video creators. But mostly, it focuses on B2B video hosting purposes.
It is primarily intended for video production, management, and distribution for marketing reasons. Its features include video-customer relationship management to expand your audience, CRM software that is effective for your sales and marketing teams, SEO tools, and video analytics tools. You will also receive a personalized video player, organization features, and the "Up Next" function.
You can opt for ad-free streaming and customize your videos with your business branding. That way, you can have a better relationship with your audience. Generate reports and look at how your videos did through comprehensive analytics. Should it not perform as what you expected, you can use the marketing features to top it up.
However, there are major limitations to expect. For a free plan, you only get 8 GB of file size and up to 2 hours of video length.
Key Features and Benefits
- Great for B2B purposes
- One of the most reliable video analytics companies
- Marketing tools to augment your viewers
- Personalized functions to effectively relate your videos to your audience
- Has a free video-hosting option
#4 Vimeo
Vimeo is ideal for users who value high-quality material over what is currently trendy. Short videos, animation, educational pieces, and in-depth journalism are all welcome. The steady caliber of Vimeo's offerings is a breath of fresh air after slogging through YouTube's sea of hit-or-miss content.
This video hosting platform allows you to manage, watch, and play videos on-demand. There is a profile menu that will enable you to access your uploads or communications easily. You can manage payments and change notification options. You may also see a tab with easy connections to various operations, such as uploading or sorting your videos and analyzing your video analytics.
Vimeo also includes a robust dashboard from which you may submit videos or sort any of your past uploads by title, privacy status, or date added. Depending on your plan, you can view your workspace, which includes project folders and your weekly storage limit. Uploading films to Vimeo is simple. You may choose a file from your computer's hard drive or link it to a cloud service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
Every video is also organized into categories for your viewers, and each top-level issue is further subdivided into subcategories. However, you won't likely hit a trending video here or upscale your videos.
Key Features and Benefits
- Various features to control and manage your channel and videos
- See and analyze video analytics through different metrics
- Dashboard to manage your videos
- Set personalized settings
- Carefully sorted out categories per video
- Easy ways to export
#5 Gumlet
As a business owner, you would want to ensure your customers won't drop out due to simple glitches in their video streaming. Plus, if your video library grows every month, it is challenging to identify which videos work best, what kind of videos perform consistently, and what the ideal video length is for their audience. Simple video analytics won't suffice for this.
Gumlet's video hosting platform allows you to upload videos quickly, automatically optimize them, stream them, and obtain engagement insights in minutes. It is a fully managed system for ingesting, processing, and streaming videos worldwide. Superior per-title encoding gives the greatest quality for every video at the lowest bitrates.
Moreover, it can function as video analytics software since it provides fast, thorough insights into every video component. Drill down to a specific person or a particular view moment. You won't have to worry about occasional malfunctions, too, because its multi-CDN rerouting has a 99.99% uptime with millions of concurrent users.
Features
Build your video pipeline
Gumlet allows you to create a unique video infrastructure in minutes, giving you total control over how your users interact with the video. You may submit videos from anywhere and access game-changing per-title encoding, which decreases bytes without sacrificing quality for an unrivaled end-user experience. With a simple dashboard, you can upload, manage, organize, and publish your films to manage your content better.
Buffer-free video streaming
Gumlet, unlike the other video hosting platforms on our list, features adaptive bitrate streaming, which allows you to smoothly deliver the proper quality and resolution of videos to each end-user. The video stream is adjusted in real-time based on the processing capacity, device size, and internet speed of the video consumers to give the greatest possible stream quality for a better video experience.
On the other hand, it also employs the Fastly + Cloudfront multi-CDN network to provide an excellent streaming experience. Multi CDN enables low latency streaming and fewer rebuffering events to deliver the finest video streaming experience possible on any device. They also provide AWS Cloudfront support for failover and redundancy. This results in a 99.99 percent uptime SLA.
Comprehensive video analytics
All of the viewer metrics you need to make data-driven decisions are available, including total views, unique users, playing duration, playback completed, and more. You may utilize video experience insights to serve faultless videos at the appropriate resolution to every viewer.
Learn more about what, where, when, and how your viewers are streaming and remove edgy situations for a seamless video streaming experience. Furthermore, you may import data from all of your apps and websites without API integrations of any kind.
To sum it up, you receive a completely managed solution for ingesting, processing, and streaming videos internationally, as well as unrivaled video performance and extensive insights into every component of the video. There is also a guarantee of 99.99% uptime, so you will never have to deal with interface bugs.
Benefits
- Detailed video analytics to inform video strategy and calculate ROI
- State-of-the-art video content protection with DRM and tokenized access
- Best video experience with optimized video encoding and streaming
- Guaranteed better video experience with "per-title-encoding"
- One-click video protection implementation
- Easy setup and integration across all platforms
- Scaling becomes simple when your audience grows to millions of views
- With 99.99% uptime SLAs, Multi CDN offers fully stable and worldwide coverage
- Video protection features include geo-blocking, preventing unauthorized access, etc.
With 1 Billion+ media files every day, 60% average optimization, and 6000+ sites and apps, Gumlet is wholeheartedly trusted by small and big companies, including Diesel, Bloomberg, Simple Learn, and more. Now, you can join their roster and scale your videos with Gumlet.
Startups building video-first products may apply for the Gumlet Startup credits program to avail of $10,000 in credits.
Video Hosting Sites Besides YouTube
Everywhere you go, the search engine often leads you directly to YouTube. But it's not popularity that counts; it's the quality to consider. Through other efficient video hosting platforms like Gumlet, Vimeo, Wistia, and Dacast, you are in for fresher video hosting functions where you can access video analytics, marketing tools, personalization features better than what YouTube can provide.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
