Video hosting
The term video hosting stands for website hosting services for websites requiring online video sharing or streaming options. The regular shared web hosting or VPS have limitations on bandwidth and disk space (even if your web hosting plan indicates unlimited bandwidth, disk space etc, it has a maximum threshold value, and if you overrun it, you may be in trouble). As a result, the need for streaming video hosting was realised by several website hosts, and online video hosting was separated as a distinct hosting service.
Are you a YouTube Fan?
The chances are high that you’re also one amongst the millions of YouTube fans. YouTube is the largest video sharing website that currently boasts of millions of video clips in its database. It contains video clips submitted by countless users, and serves as a platform to share your personal videos with the world.
Video Web Hosting versus Usual Shared Web Hosting
A normal shared hosting account can also serve the purpose of video hosting for sometime unless you overrun your limits. Remember, the term un-metered or “unlimited” never means literally infinite. But, you need massive space to store videos like those stored in the database of YouTube and the chances are high that you may receive a warning from your shared web hosting provider that you’ve exceeded you allocated quota of disk space and monthly bandwidth transfers once you’ve got enough videos on your site. Moreover, if you’re planning to start an online video hosting, streaming or video web hosting site, you must consult your shared web hosting provider straight away and enquire whether there’s a dedicated video hosting package available separately.
A video hosting service facilitates you in uploading video clips on to your website. Basically, after you upload the videos, your video host transfers them on to its web server, and gives out individual codes corresponding to each video, using which users of website can view them (just like YouTube does). A video hosting website is also alternatively known as video sharing website. And, you must remember that the size of database of such video sharing websites can increase dramatically over time. It hardly takes few months time for the disk space to reach a limit of 1 TB, starting with hardly few GBs.
Need for Video Hosting: What has Caused this Boom in Popularity of Video Sites
It is perceived that increase in the popularity of high camera phones has resulted in sudden boost in supply of user-generated videos. But, as most of the conventional methods of personal video distributions, including burning DVDs aren’t the way to go with high volume of low resolution camera phone clips. However, the high speed broadband Internet connections are the best option, but again not too many folks have got their own web servers, isn’t it? Well, that’s how a great demand for user-generated video content hosting has aroused, making YouTube a multi-million website.
Purpose of Video Hosting
Video hosting aims at saving on bandwidth costs, and rather eliminating the same, to the maximum possible extent. Here are some more objectives of video hosting:
- Creating a common place like YouTube to share videos.
- Rendering a hassle-free experience to upload or stream videos, embedding them into web pages and doing anything that you want through a web browser, without requiring any programming knowledge.
- Eliminating the need to handle your video storage.
Copyright Issues
While sites like Wikipedia use only freely available videos (in Ogg format), the video hosting services like the infamous YouTube, are permitted to hold copyrighted material – of course some rights rest in the hands of such companies. If you start a personal video hosting site, you may face copyright violation issues, in case you try to distribute copyright videos as a part of your free service (doesn’t matter how old the video(s) may be).
Mobile video hosting
These days even mobile video hosting is getting popular because youngsters enjoy watching videos on smartphones, PDAs and cell phones. Live streaming software such as the likes of Qik allows you to upload videos from mobiles to internet. Once the video clips are uploaded on to the server, they can be shared with others via platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Orkut etc.
Popularity of Streaming Video Web Hosting
Nowadays, things are changing pretty fast and it is the age of live audio/video streaming, because people don’t want to burden their PC’s hard drives with movies, video clips and songs. As such, they prefer live audio/video streaming services. Today, several companies provide top class streaming video web hosting services that facilitate the users to watch lengthy videos online (of 1 GB or more) without downloading the file locally onto their PC. Therefore, it is even possible to see an entire movie with the help of these streaming video hosting services. As a matter of fact, the number of downloads of larger files (500 MB-1.5 GB) has reduced drastically because people prefer to download only their favourite movies, or short funny video clips; otherwise they’re content with watching other videos merely by live streaming.
In a Nutshell
Streaming video web hosting or video web hosting as a whole, is necessary for those who wish to build online video streaming/sharing websites comprising of massive databases of the order of TB. The videos are stored onto the server, and the website owner can limit their download, and permit only live streaming option (just as YouTube does, on most occasions). It is one of the booming sectors in the world of internet, which has enough potential left to be harnessed and build a profitable website. Video hosting can considerably cut short on hosting expenses and the regular shared web hosting services can’t cater to the needs of such live video streaming websites. Warning: You must take care of the copyright issues, while uploading the video files, and sharing them with others over the internet. Remember, certain videos can be shared online, but they can’t be downloaded, burnt in CD/DVD/Blu Ray discs or sold otherwise.