Is your business suffering from bad site performance and poor playback? It’s time to store your videos on a video sharing platform. Why? Apart from actually producing and editing your online videos, you need a video server to host them. You might first think to upload them to your web host. However, this isn’t a great idea as your already overloaded server may not be able to store heavy video files and cause poor site performance, poor streaming quality and playback. Instead, most online businesses use video sharing platforms to get their video content online. In this blog, we will share about video sharing platforms, the best ones out there and more .
So, why would a business choose not to host their videos on their own servers? The main reason is that videos are large — thousands of times larger than the average image on a page.
The biggest benefit of video sharing platforms for viewers is that content owners can gain access to broad categories of videos within seconds. Also, uploading a video to a video platform enables easy embedding on a website.
Whenever you try to store large video files on your web server that is overloaded with data, it can cause poor site performance, poor streaming quality and playback, and exceeded storage limits. That’s the reason why businesses prefer storing their videos on a dedicated video hosting site and then embed videos in their website. Video sharing platforms solve this problem by enabling users to upload their videos to a specialized video server, and viewing those videos on the host’s website.
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First, let us analyze some free video sharing platforms for hosting and sharing videos.
This video sharing service needs no introduction- YouTube is by far the most popular and the largest video sharing website on the internet with 1.9 billion logged-in users active on the site every month.
YouTube’s omnipresence makes it a go-to for many online startups that produce and distribute video. The biggest benefit being its free usage. However, in the long run, YouTube isn’t the best place to host videos. The biggest drawback of YouTube is its ads between video playback in exchange for free hosting. Also, there is no scope for branding and frequent recommendations from our competitors make it even more challenging for your brand to gain recognition.
TikTok has been the hub for short-form content creators since it came out. It’s the go-to video sharing platform for entertainers as you don’t have to be extraordinarily talented to use it as a YouTube alternative. As long as you can entertain, inform or lip-sync, you are ready to fetch a high number of audience engagement on your videos. The best part is that it’s free.
TikTok is only recommended for entertainers who are starting out and want to get an overall view of the market before investing in a paid video hosting service. It’s not suited for enterprises looking othost secure long-form videos.
Apart from YouTube and TikTok, another popular video sharing platform where content creators can easily add their content to a diverse video content catalog is Facebook Watch. The feature that makes Facebook a great YouTube alternative is the ability to watch videos with friends at the same time. The highly personalized feed enables users to easily scroll through their favorite uploads. Adding videos to the timeline and Facebook Watch made Facebook one of the leading video distributors on the internet.
Muvi Flex is an enterprise-level cloud video sharing platform offering VoD solutions. It is an end-to-end cloud video platform that offers a variety of advanced features like cloud encoding, top-tier delivery, video security, and cross-device playback that enables enterprises to launch a VoD platform instantly, without any coding knowledge.
Muvi Flex is a robust and customizable video hosting platform that allows you to upload, manage and distribute videos and also lets you build responsive video solutions on your apps/websites.
Its built-in multiple monetization options enable content creators to monetize their content by opting from its varied content monetization models including PPV, subscriptions, and AVoD.
Muvi has multiple pricing tiers for organizations with different sizes and budgets:
Wistia is a private video hosting platform ideal for marketers. Wistia serves as both a video host and a marketing tool for businesses. It’s a customizable platform with some robust tools for marketing allowing marketers to create, manage, and stream video content.
No China video delivery
Wistia has a three-tier pricing plan
Vimeo Vimeo is a video streaming service directed at creative professionals and businesses and offers premium business video hosting features and is best known for their dynamic video player and video editing tools. The platform has garnered a reputation for hosting higher quality content overall, and is known for its powerful features and reliable customer support.
Vimeo has a 4-Tier Pricing plan:
Brightcove is an old player in the video streaming industry and offers video hosting solutions including cloud encoding, video-on-demand hosting. Brightcove’s Video Cloud is a video publishing platform that promises high-quality, and secure video streams. The platform is easy to use and has a lot of pre-built features that make the streaming journey of content creators hassle-free. The company supports all kinds of revenue generation models for online video distributors and is best suited for larger enterprises.
The three-tier pricing plan of Brightcove includes:
SproutVideo is another video hosting service that contains sharing and collaboration tools to track engagement and grow customer base. This video sharing platform allows you to embed ad-free videos onto your website with a customizable player. Videos can be toggled to include lead capture forms, social sharing buttons, and CTAs as well.
SproutVideo offers four pricing plans to target different budgets, including:
There are a lot of options out there for hosting your videos on the internet. You have to choose the ideal solution based on your unique requirements. We would suggest you to opt for paid video sharing platforms instead of free services to host your videos as they are more secure, more data-driven, customizable and will help you to promote your brand in the long run.
If you want a stable product, look forward to the ability to scale without hiccups, want robust monetization options, and want guaranteed privacy of your original content you should invest in a paid video sharing service like Muvi Flex. We recommend taking advantage of free trials of paid streaming solutions to get a feel for how their platforms work.
Interested in Muvi Flex? Take advantage of Muvi’s Flex’s 14-Day Free Trial to take a test drive of our enterprise-grade video sharing platform.
Written by: Sreejata Basu
Sreejata is the Manager for Muvi’s Content Marketing unit. She is a passionate writer with a background in English Literature and music. By week Sreejata spends her time in the corporate world of Muvi, but on weekends she likes to take short hiking trips, watch movies and read interesting travelogues.
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