Contents
What is A Video Hosting Platform?
13 Powerful Reasons Why You Need A Video Hosting Platform?
13 Reasons Why You Need A Video Hosting Platform
Hari Krishnan - September 28, 2021 - Leave your thoughts.
Did you just make the mistake of uploading your marketing video directly on a Content Management System such as WordPress? Think again! Not using a video hosting platform for hosting your marketing videos might be the biggest blunder you could be making.
There is no doubt that video marketing has taken off. Marketers everywhere are falling in love with it and 99% of those who tried it have already declared that they can never discontinue it.
However, despite its growing popularity, a common mistake that video marketers make is avoiding video hosting platforms.
You might think that the video hosting platform does not make much of a difference. But a look through these 13 powerful reasons why you need video hosting platform to opt for them might just change your mind.
What is A Video Hosting Platform?
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Before we dive into understanding the many benefits of video hosting platforms, it might be a good idea to touch upon what is exactly meant by a video hosting platform.
Video hosting platforms, as the name suggests, are platforms that allow you to host your videos. This means that these platforms allow you to upload, store, and distribute your videos using them as a medium.
As video content’s popularity has improved over the recent years, there has been a growing need for platforms that specifically deal with video content. This is because, unlike textual content and images, videos are extremely large files that require special accommodations.
While video hosting platforms might seem like a very new concept, they have been around for as long as video content itself. This is because the rise in the popularity of video content began with YouTube— the most popular, free video hosting platform in the world.
13 Powerful Reasons Why You Need A Video Hosting Platform?
Now that you have a clear idea about what a video hosting platform is and how it is used, the next step that arrives is to understand its benefits. After all, self-hosting your videos is convenient enough, right?
These 13 reasons will prove you very wrong.
1. Security & Privacy
One of the most important advantages of using video hosting platforms is the security and privacy they provide.
When you upload your videos on your website through a regular Content Management System such as WordPress, chances are that the video is easily downloadable. For most people, visiting the website’s source code for obtaining the video’s mp4 file link will not be a difficult task at all.
In such a situation, your best bet to stop your videos from being pirated easily is to use a video hosting platform. Such platforms provide a variety of measures for protection including passwords, encryptions, and firewalls.
Thus, your videos will be safe from piracy and misuse.
2. Better Audience Experience
Videos are made up of extremely large files. The average video file stands at the size of 100 MB. This can be quite problematic since most regular servers provide storage space of up to 50 GB only.
Apart from this, the bandwidth of regular hosting plans is also very narrow since it is meant to only accommodate textual content and most images. This is another issue since it indicates that only a very limited number of people can stream the videos on your website at the same time.
All this means that uploading videos directly to your website will cause it to become sluggish and buffer a lot. This can be very frustrating for your viewers and might drastically cut down your retention rate too.
With video hosting platforms, you have software specially designed for streaming videos. This means that it provides the appropriate bandwidth and server storage space necessary for loading and streaming video files.
Ultimately, video hosting platforms would reduce the amount of stress on your website and lead to a smoother video viewing experience.
3. Greater Responsiveness
Google has been experimenting with website responsiveness as a ranking factor since 2016. From 2019 onwards, the search engine started prioritizing responsiveness even more and now the mobile version of a website is its default version.
Mobile responsiveness or mobile-friendliness is the property of a website to function smoothly on a mobile device. This means that the website offers a friendly user interface with minimal disturbances in its core web vitals regardless of the device it is being viewed in.
As responsiveness has become more and more important for getting ranked, it is only natural that your videos and video player need to be responsive too.
Moreover, more than half of the world’s internet traffic is generated by mobile devices. Under such circumstances, it is highly likely that your videos will be played using a mobile device and need to be responsive accordingly.
With video hosting platforms, you do not have to worry about any of this since they automatically upload your video in all the relevant formats and sizes required for being responsive.
Image Source: Lithios App
4. Improved Search Engine Ranking
As mentioned earlier, mobile responsiveness or mobile-friendliness has come to become an important factor for ranking on Google’s search results. The mobile version of all web pages is considered to be their default version and Google indexes websites accordingly.
Moreover, video files are also heavy files with the potential of bringing down your website’s loading speed and turning it sluggish. This could affect your website’s retention rate too since many viewers could leave out of frustration.
All these factors influence search engine rankings. Thus, when a video hosting platform takes care of all of these, it also takes care of your video’s search engine optimization.
In the end, you are left with a quick, smooth, and responsive video player that can gain maximum organic traffic.
5. Easier to Use
How many times have we seen ordinary people becoming star YouTubers? While YouTube is only a basic form of a video hosting platform, it is an excellent example of how simple these platforms are.
Video hosting platforms are designed to have an extremely straightforward and easy-to-understand user interface. They also come with various tutorials in the form of resources like blog posts and videos so that you can have even more clarity about how to use them.
Moreover, these platforms take care of a lot of complex processes involved with uploading videos. You do not have to convert the file into different formats and sizes to make it compatible with all types of devices. You also do not have to worry about taking extra measures like security through obscurity to prevent piracy.
Everything happens in a few simple steps. This makes video hosting platforms perfect even for those who are not seasoned video editors or marketers.
6. Cost-Effective
When it comes to video hosting platforms, there is no fixed cost. You can choose to spend as much or as little as you want. In fact, some video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo (Basic Plan) are available at zero costs!
Even if you do go-ahead to invest in a video hosting platform’s paid package, it would still cost you less than uploading your videos on your website.
Since regular servers do not have enough space or bandwidth to support videos without causing major issues, you will have to invest heavily in expanding them. Moreover, self-hosting videos is not an easy task. You will most likely also require a professional’s assistance at some point or the other to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Overall, all these costs, when added up, would pile higher than the average video hosting platform’s standard plan.
7. Branding
The most amazing benefit of video hosting platforms is how easily they allow you to brand your video player based on what your business represents. While this feature is usually not available on free platforms (like YouTube) or in the free plans of other platforms (like Vimeo), it is still available at a nominal fee in the upgraded packages.
White labeling is the process of customizing an existing product or software to rebrand it for another company. In the case of video hosting platforms, you can rebrand their in-built video player according to your needs.
These customizations allow you to express your brand a lot more accurately to anyone who watches the videos. Whether it is adding your logos or using your color scheme, you can create a highly customized landing page for your videos because of their white labeling feature.
Image Source: Dacast
8. Better Ad Control
While this benefit is not universal to all video hosting platforms, it can never be availed if you choose to directly upload your video on your website.
The amount of ads, as well as the types of ads that your viewers watch before, during, and after watching your video, makes a lot of difference. Too many ads can be very annoying and cause them to leave. The same applies to excessively long ads with no option to skip.
Moreover, ads from competitors while watching a marketing video for your product/service can even be counterproductive. Unfortunately, all these are the prices one must pay if they choose to host on YouTube.
However, advanced video hosting platforms such as Vimeo, Show by Animaker, Wistia, and Vidyard provides a lot more freedom in this aspect. You have control over the ads your viewers can watch so that the viewing conditions are ideal for your brand.
With the paid plans of such platforms, this control becomes even better and you are left with no scope for any trouble caused by ads.
9. Increased Efficiency
As a busy professional, your time is as valuable to you as money is. So, why would you want to avoid video hosting platforms after how much they increase your efficiency?
Video marketing is not a difficult task but that does not mean it is easy either. Without the proper support and guidance of software that makes everything easy for you with its friendly user interface, there are high chances video marketing will eat up a lot of your time as you try to understand its in’s and out’s.
Most video hosting platforms are deliberately made with a very simple user interface that requires minimal investment to learn.
Moreover, directly uploading videos on your website would mean uploading them in different file sizes and formats to make sure that they can be played on different devices. Converting and uploading the files, again and again, would take up a lot of time too.
Again, with video hosting platforms, you can do this in an instant without any additional hassle.
10. Easy Integration
A fantastic benefit of video hosting platforms is the ease with which they allow you to integrate other software and tools into your platform.
When you use videos for marketing, there are a number of factors you need to take care of. You need to keep a check on your leads, conversions, sales, etc. While video hosting platforms provide excellent analytics, a lot of these factors are beyond the scope of even analytics as robust as theirs.
In such a situation, the ability to integrate additional tools can be of great help. Through such integrations, you can keep all your video marketing needs to be consolidated in one place to a large extent.
In fact, when you choose the best video hosting platforms even allows you to link forms and lead magnets directly to your videos by integrating additional tools. All this makes your video streaming experience very well-rounded.
11. Customer Support
With video hosting platforms, almost all your video marketing needs are met in one place. Whether you want to store your video files, organize them, or distribute them— video hosting platforms allow it all.
Since all these features are offered by a single platform, it also means that the single platform’s personnel are equipped to assist you with the same should you require any assistance.
This makes the entire video marketing process a lot easier since a single customer care number can provide you with the solution to many of your problems. It would also save you the time, money, and hassle of hiring individual professionals for taking care of the same issues. But it is also important to know the do’s and don’ts of video marketing when it comes to hassle-free marketing activities.
12. Deep Video Analytics
Whether it is video marketing or any other marketing practice, certain fundamentals will always remain the same. One of these is the measurement of the marketing content’s performance.
The aim of all marketing is to drive leads and generate sales. In order to make sure that these goals are being met, you need to have several quantitative parameters that allow you to measure the success of your marketing videos.
With video hosting platforms, you are provided deep and robust video analytics from a variety of points of view. Several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are provided by the platform that makes performance tracking much easier.
13. More Secure Marketing Funnel
Video marketing platforms allow you to plug any leaks in your marketing funnel relatively easily.
As mentioned in the previous point, they provide some very deep analytics that aids a lot in performance measurement. The aim of this is to identify any gaps in the marketing strategy and close them off as soon as possible.
With this experimental approach, your marketing funnel becomes a lot more secure. Thus, a video hosting platform’s detailed analytics can help you make your video marketing funnel a lot more secure.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Video marketing is the need of the hour.
Since the beginning of YouTube in 2005, videos have become an increasingly popular content medium. By 2016, the video marketing industry had started booming with 61% of businesses claiming that they use videos for marketing purposes.
This number has only shot up in recent years and video ad spend is expected to rise by 41.9% by the year 2024.
Consumers are also increasingly demanding video content from brands with 9 out of 10 consumers wanting brands to use more videos in their marketing efforts. Videos allow them to retain up to 95% of the information being conveyed and influence the buying decisions of 84% of consumers.
All this data makes it amply clear that video marketing is gaining traction rapidly and will continue to grow in the coming years. In such a situation, focusing on video content would be one of the best choices for any business.
Choosing the right video hosting platform requires tons of factors to be taken into consideration.
The very first factor that you must consider is budget. There would be no point in comparing the features of platforms if you cannot afford some of them. By taking your budget into consideration at the very first step, you eliminate all the choices that were completely out of your reach.
Following this, you must also consider the purpose of your video marketing efforts. Certain platforms are more suitable for some purposes than others. For example, if you want your video to be readily available in the public domain, nothing can beat YouTube.
Lastly, you need to consider the features and integrations you would require in your video hosting platform. If you are not too worried about ads then it would be pointless to prioritize them. On the other hand, if you want a flexible video hosting platform then you would have to compare your options accordingly.
Based on these three factors, you should be able to find your ideal platform. If you feel like you cannot find the right platform for you in your budget then you might have to raise it a bit since most of the top platforms offer partially/fully paid plans.
The top three video hosting platforms available in the market as of now are:
Vimeo
Vimeo provides both free as well as paid packages for its users. It provides great flexibility in its paid packages and also has a significant database of users.
However, one of the main drawbacks of Vimeo is that it has been known for its frequent updates that often frustrate users.
Vidyard
Vidyard is one of the most premium video hosting platforms available in the market. With the highest prices, the software still stands in the top 3 because of its immense personalization options, SEO-friendly video player, and lightning-fast user interface.
However, one must always remember that this is also the most expensive option that might not be feasible for many.
Show by Animaker
Show is the newest video hosting platform from the house of Animaker. It has a perfect set of growth tools to attract, engage, and convert your viewers into paying customers. It is quite different from others in terms of built-in CRM. It comes with no-code integration features that are very helpful for your team to use without any guidance.
Comes with an integrated VFM that is a new moat for fast-growing companies to adopt videos in their marketing channel and make it the #1 source for leads and revenue. One platform with different solutions as video hosting, video creation, video analytics, video email, video prospecting, promoting, etc. with future-ready 5G & 8K Friendly video infrastructure. The show integrates with major video-making platforms like Animaker, Vmaker, etc.
Wistia
What sets Wistia apart is that it does not just have amazing analytical tools, an SEO-friendly video player, and a decent degree of customizability. It also has extensive organization features that make it more of a video marketing platform than a video hosting platform.
However, the issue with this platform is that when compared to other platforms, it does not provide as many options for personalization.
While any video hosting platform, in general, is better than having none at all, there is no denying the fact that paid platforms give you an edge. In fact, there are certain features of video hosting platforms that only exist in the paid plans of this software.
Opting for a paid video hosting platform is usually a good idea only if you have some amount of experience in video marketing. Video marketing, like other forms of marketing out there, requires practice and experimentation for perfecting.
Carrying this hit and trial method out while using paid platforms can weigh down your company’s budget unnecessarily. At best, it is still an unnecessary expense because of the sufficient number of free options available in the market.
However, if you are directly diving deep into extensive video marketing on a large scale, a paid platform can be extremely helpful for you. With the premium features it provides such as white labeling, in-depth analytics, and multi-level organizational options, it will be much easier for you to implement and control your campaigns.
Video hosting platforms and video content management systems are often confused with each other. While the two are different, this is not a surprise because they have very similar features. In fact, a platform might actually serve both purposes simultaneously too.
Strictly speaking, video hosting platforms are only meant for distributing your video content. However, they also provide innumerable storage and analytics features as they have evolved.
It is video content management systems, on the other hand, that are actually supposed to provide safe storage space for videos so that they can be sorted, distributed, and preserved.
Thus, many of the video hosting platforms that we see around us nowadays double down as video CMS too.
So, Which Video Hosting Platform Are You Choosing?
Clearly, video hosting platforms are essential for carrying out video marketing successfully. They give you the best shot at exposure through search engine rankings, make the marketing process easier, and provide your viewers with a pleasant experience.
With so many compelling advantages and minimal issues, not opting for a video hosting platform can never be a good option for any business. So, the question remains only one— which hosting platform are you going for?
