Hosting user videos

Question

My client would like website visitors to embed videos in their profiles. We've suggested that we use YouTube for a quick and cost-effective (free) solution. However he is not keen that YouTube would control access to the videos which are an important part of his service. It seems unlikely that YouTube would suddenly pull the plug but to do so would be a very bad look for his business.

Any recommendations or suggestions for alternative solutions or services? A lot of sites do use YouTube in this way. Do you feel his concerns are valid?

This is a small business so large upfront development or service costs are out. The website is built in ASP.NET 3.5 using C# and SQL Server 2005.

Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Take a look at Hey!Watch.

It's a video converting webservice. It supports a lot of formats and the converted videos can be stored on FTP, Amazon S3... it also supports watermarking and a lot of other options.

And it's not expensive at all.

I don't recommend doing your own conversion and storage. Video conversion takes a LOT of CPU and RAM, and storage takes a lot of disk space and bandwidth. The CPU and RAM problems can be solved with Hey!Watch, the storage problem with S3.