The Best Free Video Hosting Sites
Youtube home page
Youtube.com
Youtube.com is worlds most popular video sharing website. The benefits are that it is easy to use and it's owned by Google, so it's unlikely that the service will go away. It's easy to embed youtube videos in other sites like facebook and myspace or a personal blog. The big negative is it's so big that it's hard to stand out. The platform also isn't integrated with content management systems, so there is some SEO loss and traffic is split between your site and YouTube.
HubPages is the Best Integrated Video Hosting Site
HubPages offers free video hosting integrated into the full content creation service. That means videos can be posted with an article and other interesting widgets like polls, maps, tables. HubPages also offers a complete monetization service that includes video ads and display ads placed outside of the video which offers higher yields. However, the best part about the integrated video service in HubPages is the SEO benefit that YouTube doesn't offer. Since the article is attached to the video, traffic comes to a single page that builds more seo strength and a better user experience.
* Disclosure: I'm the founder and CEO of HubPages and have a vested interest in the success of HubPages Video
Vimeo is a very high class hosting service
Vimeo video appeals to video producers that want an ad free environment. It's an extremely well designed site with a loyal community. They have subscription services as well as a basic free service with many limitations.
Vimeo Free and Paid Offerings
- $59.95 / year
or $9.95 / monthPlus
- Even higher quality video
- 5GB/week upload space
- Unlimited HD uploading/embedding
- Advanced statistics
- Faster, priority uploading
- Original file storage and downloading
- Super-customizable video player
- Privacy with domain-level control
- Plus members never see ads, ever
- Exclusive discounts on products
- Free!
Basic
- High quality video
- 500MB/week upload space
- Upload 1 HD video/week
- 3 albums, 1 group, 1 channel
- No bandwidth or time limits
- Basic video player customization
- Password-protected videos
Free Video Sites
What is the best site to post your videos to?
See results without votingHosting Copyright Videos
Hosting sites like HubPages and YouTube operate under the DMCA. You must have the rights to post the video to the site. Copyright holders can file DMCA take down notices that the hosting provider must respond to when properly filed. All hosting sites in the United States of America are subject to these laws.
Sometimes people aren't familiar with the laws and put songs and pictures that they don't have the rights to post. Youtube has a system that can identify some of this content by digital fingerprints. If the copyright holder has instructed YouTube to allow the content, but to place ads on their behalf, they may allow some types of copyrighted content to be posted.
Are These Good Services For Family Videos
I started looking into these services since we are looking for a video hosting service to store family videos. What I was hoping to find is a place that would take videos of any length and keep master copies of the videos without losing any of the quality. All of the free services transcode the videos into a format that can be viewed on the web and this means that they reduce the bit rate and the quaility of the video. So these services are good for sharing, but I wouldn't recommend them as a cloud hosting service that you can count on to replace your local hard drive.
Comments
Paul,
I love the hub Thank you! Two more really good free places are Dailymotion.com and Metacafe.com ...If you are into personal branding which most every single marketer online should be or if you just want more exposure to your videos ..then these two have great google rankings and with Dailymotion you can easily post any video along with description to any blog that you have access to if you have a blogger account. Great HUB...as far as the storage I have run across a few places that will allow it...I did not need it at the time so those places have slipped my mind....Flickr now allows video uploads you may check more into that..
For basic marketing purposes, not necessarily personal videos, YouTube is still tough to beat. Most videos, if produced correctly can be impactful in under 10 minutes. Most people have short attention spans, anyway.
if your goal is to save original format and not sharing of the video what is stopping you from saving them to your own website. If your hosting plan is limited to space and you are exceeding that you could always look into the Amazon's S3 service.
If you are interested in having another site share and deliver your video they are always going to compress it.
If you serve it from your own website you are not concerned about bandwidth because it is for personal viewing.
@pfuller I do want to share them with friends and family, but long term safe storage is of high importance to me. I've thought about building a storage site on Amazon S3. But, it seems like there must be an application that does this. I've done a bit more research and have found some file storage sites that support video like box.net, divshare, and badongo.com. Most have a monthly fee after 5 GB. I have about 500 GB I'd like to off-load.
Still we are waiting for something better than youtube . New revolution!!!
I like Veoh best as it allows downloading directly, if you get their free software first, and also the quality of many of the videos is HD which is rare if ever the case with Youtube. thanks for hub!
The best video hosting service should support many video formats, less filter or copyright filter for music slideshow, fast uploading, considerable storage capacity and no downloading requirement but can viewing online directly. Is there one there?
This is an excellent Hub and Your blog is very informative.
Paul Edmondson 3 years ago
I'm trying to find a storage or video service so I can free up a bunch of local disk space. But, I cant find a service that seems to be perfect for all the video we have of the kids. Suggestions?