Sooner or later, regardless of how else you distribute your videos, you’ll want to upload them to an online service… maybe uploading the same ones to 2, 3 or more such services. It’s the easiest way to show your work. All you need after the upload is to send a short email to your friends and family, with a link to your new online video. Most of the services will send the email for you.
It’s loads of fun, and without the costs or additional steps to get the files onto discs.
YouTube has become an everyday household word. But there are dozens or hundreds of others which can be more suited to a particular video. For example:
- My travel-related videos get much more viewing by other travelers when I put them on www.tripadvisor.com
- Photo Story videos that fail the conversion step at YouTube, as they try to make the Flash files from them, get converted to Flash files easily at www.vimeo.com
Most online services take your uploaded files and convert them to other file types, Flash being a common one. As it’s the Flash file being seen by viewers, not the ones you uploaded, be prepared to see a lower quality video as a result of the conversion process.
The free online services will change over time. Some will be ramping up to provide a new and better service, while others will be merging or being absorbed such as YouTube now being owned by Google.
In addition to the free services, there are subscription fee based ones such as Neptune and Mydeo. Neptune is a ‘file download’ service and Mydeo provides ‘streaming’. Many confuse the two. Often the file download process starts playing sooner than the same file setup for streaming. The details are for another article another day.
If you’re not yet uploading your videos to an online service, it’s time to start.