5 Reasons to Use YouTube to Host Videos

Displaying videos on websites has always been tricky and can quickly become frustrating when you’re trying to make them work in all browsers. One of the easiest ways to avoid the headaches of hosting and embedding issues is to use YouTube (or others, such as Vimeo). Here are 5 reasons why:

Ease of Use

Upload is easy and source video can be in a variety of formats including: AVI, MPG, MOV, WMV, & more. Currently videos can be up to 2GB in size and 15 minutes in length. In most cases, this is plenty. The whole process takes a few minutes; video will be encoded automatically and available online within an hour or so.

Customizable

When you click “Embed” you can select a few options, the most obvious being the dimensions of the video. There are even more customization options as well:

• Autoplay
• Loop
• Start
• Border
• Full screen
• Related Videos
• HD playback

For details on these settings, see the YouTube Embedded Player Parameters.

Free Hosting

Videos use up a lot of server space and can quickly eat up bandwidth. Why pay for this when you can easily offload the work and get it for free? If you post a lot of videos this becomes even more invaluable.

Browser Compatibility

To get videos working properly in all browsers while using valid code there are a variety of embedding techniques, some easier than the others. Even with HTML5 and the new video tags, this will continue to be a bit of a headache for developers if a self hosted solution is used. Save time debugging and post video with confidence that it will work flawlessly every time.

More Exposure

If you’ve created a video, why not share it and gain more exposure to your site? You can also keep it private if need be but in most cases you might as well keep it public and post a link to your site.