Video Hosting Software

If you create a video for your website to promote your company’s offerings, feature updates, or any other content, where do you place the video for your customers/users? Directly uploading and hosting the video on your website may not be the best solution. The large size of such videos will increase your website’s server bandwidth and storage space which will cause your website to run slower, degrade the video quality, and will increase video buffering time with unexpected pauses. This can lead to customer frustrations, potentially losing them to your competitors.

Video hosting platforms can save you from this problem and provide a smooth viewing experience for your site visitors. These platforms host videos on their servers, and you can use an embed code or link to insert them on your website or elsewhere. This reduces the load on your website and plays videos with minimal disturbances regardless of the user’s device.

In this buyers guide, we explain what a video hosting platform is, its features and benefits, and the considerations you should keep in mind when selecting a video hosting solution for your business.

Here’s what we'll cover:

• What are video hosting platforms?
• Common features of video hosting platforms
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of video hosting software
• Key considerations
• Market trends to understand

What are video hosting platforms?

Video hosting platforms enable users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the internet. Using such software, individuals and businesses can host and stream live, on-demand videos, or upload videos for the audience to view at their own time, all in one place.

These platforms eliminate the need for downloading videos to hard drives to watch it on installed media players, or share them via email and flash drive. It lessens the buffering time of videos allowing thousands of viewers to stream these files at a given moment.

Video streaming in Vimeo Pro software (Source)

Common features of video hosting platforms

Software features vary by product or vendor, but most video hosting platforms have the following overlapping features:

Video streaming	Stream live or recorded videos over the internet. This lets your audience instantly view your content without downloading them on their devices.
Reporting/analytics	Gain insight on video performance by analyzing audience engagement, duration of views, and viewership by device. You can also see how videos are influencing important metrics, such as revenue and conversions.
Social sharing	Stream videos on social media channels, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to attract viewers and bring them back to your own website.
Access controls/permissions	Use permission settings to control who within or outside your organization can access your video content.
Collaboration tools	Allow users to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate among themselves in real time on files. This can cut out unnecessary meetings and allow users to spend more time creating valuable video content.
Content library	Allow users to store videos in categories and groups within the tool. Users can create a playlist of videos, bookmark them for reference, delete when required, or publish them.
Live streaming	Capture, stream, record, and share live content as well as interact with the audience through real-time engagement options, such as live chat.
Search/filter	Allow visitors, both internal employees and customers, to find specific videos of their interest. You can search your meeting recording and company videos. Your website visitors can type in keywords or click on certain topics and get directed to the relevant videos.

What type of buyer are you?

Before purchasing a video hosting service, you should assess which buyer category you belong to. The majority of buyers fall into the following categories:

• Individuals: Buyers in this category primarily create content for consumers. They can be freelancers, artists, travelers, or other content creators whose main purpose is to entertain their audience, create awareness, and promote their talent. Buyers in this category need a tool that provides them with security features and social sharing. This will help them share videos on multiple platforms and also secure their video content from being illegally used by anyone. They should opt for a free video hosting site that can ease their job of editing and managing their content without much cost.
• Businesses: Businesses mostly use videos for marketing purposes. They use video marketing to promote their new products, launch them, update their customers about new features, offers or discounts, demonstrate products, or interact with their consumers. They need a video hosting tool that has a good storage capacity, and integrates with other marketing tools and CRM software, which can help them generate leads, and manage their content better. These buyers should opt for a fully-featured video hosting solution with features such as video security for confidential video messages, live streaming, content monetization, and offer insightful reports and analytics to track their performance and audience engagement. Video hosting platforms with custom branding features will help businesses provide a better user experience to their audience.

Benefits of video hosting platform

Listed below are some benefits you can expect from using a video hosting platform:

• Better audience experience: Directly uploading videos to your website will cause buffering issues, which can be frustrating for your viewers. Only a limited number of viewers will be able to stream videos at the same time. Video hosting sites are especially designed for streaming videos that provide good bandwidth and server storage space. Videos can then be embedded into your website for a better viewing experience.
• Increased efficiency: Creating videos for marketing purposes can be a time-consuming process without the proper tools. Converting and uploading files again and again on your website will take time and reduce the efficiency of your website. A video hosting platform with a user-friendly interface can help you upload videos of different file sizes and formats faster with high-definition quality. With instant uploads, viewers can play the videos on different devices. This will increase your business efficiency by having more time to create timely video content for your audience.
• Security: Protecting your video content from being pirated is very crucial. With internal messages within the organization, monetizing your video, or housing viewers’ sensitive content, it is necessary to secure this information from falling into the wrong hands. Most video hosting platforms offer security tools such as IP and geographic restrictions, password protected streaming, domain restrictions, and encryption functionalities. These features can help you protect your videos from being misused.

Key considerations

Here’s something to keep in mind when looking for video hosting software:

• Business needs: If your company creates and hosts videos for marketing purposes, then you will require features that offer customized branding options, unlimited file storage, lead capture, embed video player, and monetization for video views. You can opt for a subscription-based or premium platform. But if you are a freelance content creator, looking to stream videos for fewer viewers, look for a free open source video hosting platform with basic features offering social media shares, basic video analytics, and quality adjustments based on internet speed.
• Integration capabilities: When you use videos for marketing purposes, you need to keep track of your leads, conversions, and sales, most of which you analyze on other platforms and applications. Select a video hosting platform that is easy to integrate with other software such as marketing automation tools, customer relationship management, sales tracking, and lead capture software. Integration capability will help you manage and consolidate your marketing needs in one place.

Market trends to understand

Here’s a trend in the video hosting software market that you should be aware of:

• Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to upscale content resolution in video hosting software: Video hosting software has made it easy for companies to shift from offline to online marketing. As video consumption has increased since the pandemic, businesses need to keep improving the streaming experience, especially the image/video resolution. AI models incorporated in an online video platform can self-learn from images to generate high-resolution images from a low-resolution image.. This process is called super-resolution. Video hosting service providers will be required to adopt AI into their platforms to provide users the benefit of improving user experience.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.