Video Sharing

12
Jul/092

Video sharing is a service that provides the ability to show your video on the web for the general audience or a targeted one on your website. Video sharing services are free(for the content owner/publisher), as opposed to video hosting services. In a sense video sharing is a synonym for “free video hosting“. It is usually personal or viral content and often intended as a community. As opposed to generic file sharing, video sharing is about the actual content and not it’s carrier(the files). This is achieved through a process called video streaming. The primary intent for video sharing services is personal use. Video sharing services are a great resource for viral marketing initiatives in order to create brand awareness.

For a more detailed explanation on the differences between video sharing services and video hosting services read Video Sharing vs. Video Hosting.

Video sharing networks are either built around a portal site or point-to-point.

Portal based video sharing services

These usually have one or more portal websites where the “community” of users meet. These portals allow targeting of the content by categorization, tagging and comments and can be indexed by external search engines. Portal sites like youtube.com and dailymotion.com are some of the busiest sites on the planet and serve a huge auditory. Thus video sharing services are a great place to popularize your content. The primary problem with video sharing services driven by an owned content delivery network (CDN) is the financing of this network. A video sharing service may finance it’s services through ads displayed in the portal or even ads in the video player (pre-roll/post-roll/intermissions/banners/text ad units). Some video sharing services also provide video hosting services as a paid membership or a way to pay for the bandwidth.

Point-to-point video sharing networks

These networks are similar in business model to p2p file sharing networks, but provide real-time protocol support in order to stream video. The benefit of this business model is that the cost for network transfer is spread across the users themselves and there is no need for huge investment in connectivity and hardware from the service owners. The drawback is that there is a need to attain certain critical mass in order for a file to be accessible on-demand in real time. I.e. you may need to wait for a video to be downloaded first in order to watch it, if it is not spread enough and available on the network.

In terms of quality of delivered video a video sharing service with owned CDN usually has good “content accessibility level“(can start playback quickly and sustain it in real time), but may have to compromise with lower visual content quality(video bitrate) in order to provide a free service.

Point-to-point (p2p) video networks have no restrictions on visual content quality, however as mentioned above there may be a problem with the content accessibility level, due to the fact that the “video network” is not owned by the service owner and content on it cannot be controlled.

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