As you know, I’ve spent a fair bit of time lately discussing the use of video marketing and how to use it to leverage your online business. For the most part, I’ve covered video creation and distribution to the main video services (YouTube, MetaCafe, Blip.Tv, DailyMotion, etc) via the TubeMogul service.
One thing I have not discussed is how to place a video in a custom player on your own web site. The easiest way to post video on your own web site is to publish your video to a service like YouTube, and then place the “embed” code on your own web pages and blog posts where you want the video to appear. Most of the time, this works well-enough for the needs of most net-marketers.
But what if you do not want your video to appear on YouTube?
If your message is directed specifically to site visitors and not relevant to an outside audience, this is a possibility. Or perhaps you do not want to use the YouTube branded player, which will offer additional video options after your video plays (which you can’t control).
I recently found myself in this position; I did not want my video to appear on YouTube as I was speaking directly to a very specific audience. Additionally, I wanted complete control over the player, so visitors wouldn’t be tempted to click off in some other direction. What to do?
There are ways to stream Flash files directly onto your web pages, of course. I tried this at first. However, after several hair-tearing hours messing with both Camtasia and DreamWeaver, I gave up in frustration and went looking for a hosted 3rd-party solution.
The first one I found was Brightcove. It’s probably the most well-known video hosting service, but it’s not cheap. The “entry-level” service starts off at a mere $500/month. While I have no problem forking over cash if it’s going to leverage my business, I don’t have the videos, require the bandwidth, or get the sheer number of video views to justify spending that amount of money.
Surely there must be something cheaper?
The next service I investigated was Ooyala. It looked promising, but it too starts with a $500/month “basic” package. Ooops… not the right tool for the small business person.
Amazon’s CloudFront service appeared promising, but after 20 minutes of reading through supporting documentation, I remembered why I was investigating a third party service in the first place; to eliminate unnecessary complexity and complication. Sorry, Amazon. Bye-bye.
I finally found what I needed with a service called Vzaar.
In addition to a 30-day free trial period (no credit card required, thank you), they have monthly packages starting at $15 and going all the way up to $750!
Now that’s more like it.
I signed up for the free trial, and upgraded to the “bronze” package ($15/month) after I was able to experiment with the service and determine it suited my needs (I’m not sure how much bandwidth I’ll require, so I’ll upgrade accordingly as necessary).
Update: I’ve since upgraded to the Silver membership.
The service is slick, easy to use, and offers all the custom options I need. For instance, I was able to customize the size and color of my media player to reflect the look and feel of UltimateFatBurner.com. And I was also able to brand the player with my URL – here’s an example…
The Vzaar dashboard is simple and clutter-free, reporting on video plays, bandwidth usage and trend, as well as video activity (I’ve only got one video up with this service right now, so I haven’t included that in the screenshot)…
Although I’ve only been using the service a week or so, I’m extremely pleased so far. It offers me the customization options I need, it’s extremely affordable, and it’s drop-dead easy to use. Now here’s a time-leveraging tool to add to your video-creating library. Sign up for the free trial and see if Vzaar is right for you!
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Hi, I am the Marketing Director at HeySpread. Thanks for this good article. That is true, Tubemogul is one service.
But you should really have a look at HeySpread for Professional Video Analytics and Video Distribution – http://bit.ly/5mD1CL. Far cheaper, with exclusive features such as YouClone (copy/paste your YouTube videos to any other platform automatically and in one shot), powerful and user-friendly interface, REST API for an easy and fast white label integration.