Over the past few months I’ve learned quite a bit about Vimeo (www.vimeo.com) video hosting, and so far, I’ve found it to be quite useful, with lots of hosting options and capabilities and quite intuitive to use.
Specifically, we’ve been using the Vimeo Pro version of their service. $200 per year gets you 50GB of video storage and 250,000 plays of your video(s), and you can pay for more of either if you need to. Tons of tools, I’m not going to go over all the details but more information for that service level is at https://vimeo.com/pro, and more on their other levels are also at the site.
It wasn’t too long ago that video storage was ridiculously high priced – both in terms of file storage space and in data transfer costs. But technology and competition have combined to make the market much more accessible to just about anyone. The real cost, usually, is in the production of the video.
You don’t have to be an expert on video formats at Vimeo – simply upload your video and Vimeo will format the file automatically. There are limits to what Vimeo can format appropriately this way, but if you run into problems you can contact Vimeo to find out details of the issue.
The ability to customize the ability to view videos (for example, defining which domains can link to a video, or the ability to password protect a video) is easy to implement. Stats are kept on video usage which you can monitor. Branding of videos, and some online customizing of video look, is also available at this level.
This all just scratches the surface of what Vimeo offers, and there may be other capabilities that would be attractive to your organization. My point is, for $200 per year, if your organization has videos of interest to some subset of the web world, Vimeo is worth your consideration as a way to provide more content to your site.