Hands On: Online video hosting

For some it’s a personal thing, others see it as a route to fame and celebrity – or at least an audience for their awesome talent.

Whether you fancy yourself as the next Scorsese, Dylan Moran or Will Young, or simply want to show your folks the wedding video without having to actually visit them, online video hosting is the way to go.

Since the rise of Youtube, online video hosting has exploded and if you’re looking for an audience for your movies, there’s no shortage of hosting services from which to choose. Most hosting services will help you achieve the widest possible audience.

If you want to share personal videos with family and friends, however, some provide good privacy features. And if you fall into the viewer category, you’ll find sites that categorise content and allow you to carry out tag-based searches to find what you’re looking for.

Youtube
Probably the best-known video-hosting site is Youtube. Launched in February 2005, it has grown rapidly to become, according to Alexa.com, the 10th most popular site on the web and, according to Youtube, is serving 100 million videos a day. Youtube is one of the most feature-rich video sites – you can tag videos and comment on them, add them to a favourites list and subscribe to users whose videos you particularly admire.

Of all the video-hosting sites, Youtube appears to have the most robust privacy options which work in a very similar fashion to those on Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site. You can assign people to a friends or family contact list, or set up additional lists. Then, when you upload a video that’s not intended for public consumption, decide to which list it should be made available.

Youtube, which has been bought by Google, gets its revenue from advertising but is also encouraging commercial content providers. In September it signed a contract with Warner Music Group to commercially distribute Warner’s music videos.

To stamp out copyright infringements, Youtube implemented a 10-minute limit on the length of uploaded clips. If you’re a serious amateur film maker and want to upload longer clips you can apply for a free ‘Director’ account, which allows longer uploads as well as other features, such as your own logo and URL link.

Google Video
Google Video provides fewer ‘community’ features than some other video-hosting services, so you won’t find groups or channels, but you can rate clips, add labels and, naturally, search for content. Clips are also categorised by genre and can be located by a search of the type, for example, genre:comedy.

Most of the content on Google Video is free and uploaded by individuals. There’s also a smattering of indie record label band promos, TV show trailers and the like. But despite the fact that Google Video makes providing paid-for content easy, there is, currently at least, not that much of it about.

Where paid-for content is offered it’s often as a high-resolution option on a clip that’s available free at low resolution. We could be wrong but, even at 99 cents, we can’t see there being many takers for the Margaret Beckett interview, which was the first piece of paid-for content we managed to dig up.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of commercial content on Google Video. One of Google’s strong points is that, alongside the current clip, there’s a pane that can be configured to display comments, a playlist, other material from the same source, or related clips. Google is also international – which means that if you can’t find what you’re looking for on the UK site, you can try the US, or any of the European sites.