Video hosting platforms are third-party websites that hold your video content on the servers so that your websites run smoothly. You know that servers are where all the website’s data is stored. So, essentially when someone visits your website, they access the information that is held on the server. If you have a speedy server, your website will load faster, and that is what is preferred by the Search Engine Algorithms. Given that video content uses a lot of data, where one hour of a 1080p video would take about 1.5 GB, you do not want to be cluttering up your server. This is where video hosting platforms come into play. They are a very important part of the contemporary content marketing strategy. You have to be able to upload and share high-quality videos with your audience without there being a server lag or websites crashing. Irrespective of what your objective is, you will have to put multiple videos up. In that case, it is important to choose one of the best video hosting platforms.
Benefits of Video Hosting Platforms
It is always important to choose a video hosting platform because of the benefits it provides:
- It helps keep your video content running smoothly.
- Make sure that your videos are accessible outside your website.
- It lets you place videos on various platforms.
- Reduces technical headaches and complications.
Even if you get a dedicated server, the video puts a considerable load on your server, even if the traffic is small. If just ten visitors watch a minute of HD video, you would need one gigabyte of server bandwidth. For this bandwidth, you could get a thousand visitors or more to a text and image-based platform. So, it is important to understand why a third-party video platform is better. Given that web hosting plans restrict the bandwidth, only a single video can easily exceed your limit within a few days. So, it is always better to rely on one of the best video hosting platforms.
Best Video Hosting Platforms for Online Courses: 2021
1. Yuja
Description: Yuja is an excellent integrated video platform for hosting. It consolidates your video tools with a single platform for video hosting, lecture capture, live streaming, collaboration and video management, and distribution. They help you live stream courses and training for the classroom, conference room, or an offsite location. You can record ideas and discussions as they flow with their lecture capture tools. You can launch video conferencing for live synchronous teaching and online training sessions.
Features:
- It offers a unique and highly optimized media-encoding pipeline that uses HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). So, you get improved video startup times, minimal buffering and re-buffering, and an overall richer media experience for viewers.
- They offer complete search capabilities across auto-captions, indexes, and metadata across your entire media library, allowing you to find exactly what you need in your video collection.
- They allow you to convert, transcode, and format your video files into easy-to-view formats accessible on a variety of devices. There is no need for third-party codecs or additional software to adjust file sizes or file quality.
Pricing: You have to connect with them personally to get a quote.
Pro Tip: This is one of the best video hosting platforms because their cloud-based architecture is designed with advanced elastic scaling, load spike tolerance, and containerized sub-system redundancy to support high volume, video-at-scale production workloads. So, make sure to take advantage of the same.
2. Vimeo
Vimeo offers you excellent features with their free basic membership, but if you are looking for priority support, tons more storage, advanced privacy control, player customization, or interaction tools, you’ll want to join our other membership plans. They never put ads before, during, or after your videos and are not like other platforms. It gives you up to 7TB of storage which is enough space for 600 feature films, 60,000 social ads, or one extremely long live event.
Features:
- Their high-quality, fast-loading, supremely reliable HTML5 video player will help change the colour, add your logo, remove the play bar, add chaptering, speed controls, and more.
- They do not put ads before, during, or after your video.
- They allow you to set embed permissions, send private links, and lock videos or entire showcases with a password.
- They allow you to replace any video without changing the URL or losing your stats, likes, and comments, and even update your video right from Final Cut Pro X with our macOS app.
- They offer custom integrations with Final Cut Pro, Adobe, Dropbox, and all the creative tools you use every day.
Pricing: They have four pricing plans for video hosting and storage. The Plus plan gets you 5GB of weekly video upload and will cost you $7/month. The Pro plan gets 20GB of weekly video upload and starts at $20/month. This allows you to showcase the videos on your site and sell them directly to your fans worldwide. The Business plan has no weekly limitations but 5TB total storage. Their Premium plan gets you unlimited live streaming for $75/month.
Pro Tip: With Vimeo, you can join groups and add videos to it with a single click. This not only populates the feeds of ones in the said group but also gets you immense attention.
3. Hippo Video: Best Video Hosting Platform for Marketers
Hippo video helps in video selling, which can be a great sales hack in every step of your sales journey. It helps with personalized video emails and can skyrocket your outreach response rates. As the prospect moves forward in the buying process, videos with a personalized sales page can help account executives quickly get through the sales process and win more deals.
Features:
- They help you record, host, and share videos. They host all your video assets in a single library, so it is all accessible in one place.
- They help users take the action that you want them to, with relevant call-to-actions such as a schedule a demo button/visit a website button.
- They allow your customers to share their experience with short video testimonials without even signing up with Hippo Video.
- They provide detailed information on every single video so that you can qualify leads based on their interest and video behaviour.
- They help you personalize the player logo, colour, look and feel of the player to match your brand and create brand awareness.
Pricing: They offer a Free Plan, with which you can create unlimited videos completely free of cost for a lifetime. All users are automatically moved to the Free Plan after the seven-day trial is complete.
4. Publit.io
Description: Publitio offers the best way to deliver online video and images. They make the delivery of media files simple and also maintain complete functionality and security. They take care of the end-to-end image and video process and give you the most control and flexibility over your assets. They fix your problems with hosting, uploading, converting and protecting your media files with its simple, scalable & secure cloud-based storage with powerful, global CDN infrastructure. Publitio can meet your every demand and provide blazingly fast images and video delivery.
Features:
- They provide endless amounts of storage space.
- They assure that your content is always protected with the latest security tools.
- Their URL-based Transformations allow you to do on-the-fly transcoding of videos, conversion to different formats, apply various transformations like resizing, cropping, watermarking, quality adjustment on both images and videos.
- They allow you to make your file private, playable only on your domain and turn on HLS video encryption, which prevents the download of your video.
- Their analytics will help you understand how your files perform in terms of user engagement.
Pricing: They have no hidden costs, and you only pay for what you spend in terms of bandwidth and the storage space you occupy. Their Premium plan costs only USD 9 every month. Their Pay-as-you-go usage starts at USD 0.035 per GB of storage space and 0.075 per GB of bandwidth.
Pro Tip: A lot of these platforms do not provide the kind of security Publit does. Make sure you add an extra layer of protection for your videos with their best methods.
5. Vidgrid
Description: Vidgrid is one of the leading enterprise video platforms. It specializes in recording, hosting, in-video questions, interactive captions, integrations, and custom video API. It takes the most complex and costly procedures and makes them absolutely simple. They help with the creation of your videos, increasing engagement in the same, and keep videos in sync, up-to-date, and organized on the Grid.
Features:
- They help you quickly capture your own videos or empower others to record for you.
- They help collect comments, suggestions, and interactions from inside your video.
- They help control and keep videos in sync, up-to-date, and organized on the Grid.
Pricing: You have to connect with them personally and get a quote.
Pro Tip: Use their vast resources to record onboarding videos, test your team’s performance and organize a searchable video knowledge base. In the longer run, it helps with training and makes the platform easier to work with.
6. Uscreen
Description: Known to be the best VOD platform for Video Monetization, Uscreen can help you grow your business. It is an all-in-one platform that helps you launch, grow, and retain. You can monetize the way you want, set up subscriptions, rentals, or one-time buys to access your VOD and live streams. They help you create exclusive experiences for your subscribers. They help you optimize for conversions and growth and launch your own apps with consistent quality and experience across all platforms and devices.
Features:
- Their marketing and community features will help super-charge your reach. Use the built-in sales and analytics reports to track your success.
- They help retain customers and help you build a stable, sustainable & scalable business.
- It allows you to set up complete sales and marketing funnels with ease using the Uscreen built-in marketing tools and integrations to generate leads and convert your audience into paying subscribers.
Pricing: Their Basic plan would cost you USD 99 each month. Their Growth plan would cost you USD 199 each month. Their Uscreen Plus plan starts at USD 499 per month. In each of their plans, you would have to pay an extra USD 0.50 for each subscriber each month.
Pro Tip: This is one of the very few platforms that actually offer a retention tool. Use it to its best potential to build a stable, sustainable and scalable business.
7. Cincopa
Cincopa helps you manage your videos and deliver them across any browser or device and share high-quality videos with 4k resolution and take advantage of unlimited storage and bandwidth. Cincopa is completely secure and offers hundreds of video templates with essential on-video features that enhance your content while saving you time and effort. It offers a brilliant client interface to build and manage your media easily in a matter of clicks. Their in-house technologies make sure that videos load faster.
Features:
- They offer ready-to-use design templates that support all media types: video, audio and photo. Their responsive image galleries and slideshows work in the background, full-screen mode and fit to the screen size automatically.
- They provide detailed analytics for all embedded videos in a selected timeframe. You can segment and group stats by video file, domain, web page, and country. They help you know your audience: find out who has watched your videos; view specific data about users like location, IP address, viewing time, average engagement, first and last view dates, and platform.
- It allows you to show third-party ads with your videos to monetize your content and promote your own ads through your videos.
- It allows you to cast online video and audio using your smartphone/tablet/laptop to a local TV or speakers with a single tap.
Pricing: It offers a 30-day free trial. They offer very affordable pricing, which starts at USD 25 per month and would help you host 40 videos with 100 GB traffic bandwidth. The Corporate plan would cost USD 99 and would help you host unlimited videos and unlimited bandwidth. However, there is a video upload limit of 10 GB.
Pro Tip: Use their excellent Video CDN, which is an integral part of the platform, ensuring viewers worldwide enjoy high-quality video playback without crashes or delays. It helps deliver consistent video streaming quality and speed at scale globally.
8. Wistia
Wistia is one of the best video hosting platforms and provides everything from brandable players to actionable insights. Their intuitive platform gives you the tools to make your content perform better. You can simply upload, customize, and embed content experiences that feel like your brand and integrate with your tech stack and send engagement data to your CRM, ad platforms, and marketing tools.
Features:
- It allows you to embed your content anywhere with a player that matches your brand.
- With their CTAs, links, and email collections, you can get a measurable return.
- They allow you to publish a gallery of videos, webinars, and podcasts in one streamable experience.
Pricing: Their Free Plan comes with three videos, 200 GB of bandwidth per month, a Wistia Channel, up to 250 subscribers, and A/B testing—with the Wistia-branded player. Their Pro Plan costs $99 and provides space for as many videos as you need. Your first ten videos are included, and you’ll be charged 25¢ per month for each video after that.
Pro Tip: Wistia is highly preferable if you are looking to drive traffic to websites and improve conversions and engagement. You can use their custom video players to get more clicks.
9. Brid.tv
Using Brid. Tv, you can empower your online business with a super-fast, intuitive, and feature-rich HTML5 video player solution. They provide support for multiple video formats, and the Video Player features HLS support for HTML5 desktop, mobile browsers. You can also utilize the MPEG-DASH standard for streaming content across multiple devices.
Features:
- Their video player is lightweight and fast, with impressive load times and impeccable functionality.
- It allows you to select from user-created playlists or start implementing dynamic playlists like the latest video feed, video playlist by tag, and video playlist by channel.
- It provides a flexible and streamlined video player tech, which offers Roku and Fire TV integration via MRSS feeds.
- It allows you to extend your reach with embed codes, link sharing, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, and more.
- They offer customizable skins that represent an important part of a flexible video player and allows you to tailor your video player to suit the layout of each and every one of your websites.
Pricing:
You can get started for free, and you would get 100,000 video plays with the ability of video monetization. Their Essential plan would cost $24.99/ month and offers 150,000 video plays along with 300 GB of streaming.
Pro Tip: This is a great choice if you wish to monetize your website, and you can use their instream video player or outstream units to monetize your ad inventory.
Roundup
There are a plethora of options for the best video hosting platforms online. So, it is important to find the best option for your business. For that, it is important to identify your priorities. A smart way to do that is to combine different platforms in your strategy. You could use a paid solution to host your videos, so you have full control over them, and at the same time, take advantage of free video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Facebook to organically grow your reach. The best video hosting platform for you would be one that helps you share your content and grow your audience with a small learning curve whilst you are on a budget. You have to focus on your content and how that helps your audience grow. This list of the best video hosting platforms must certainly help you figure out what would work best for your business.