In our session last week, we briefly discussed video hosting services. Youtube is obviously the dominant player in the field, Lisa also uses Vimeo, and I use blip.tv. As usual, Wikipedia is over the top with useful information in the form of a comparison of more video hosting services than I knew existed, including technical details about how each site streams its video. Information overload. To help sort through Wikipedia’s voluminous information, I’m going to compare just a few of the more common sites: Youtube, blip.tv, Vimeo, and archive.org. I’m omitting Dailymotion, because even though it’s second only to Youtube in volume, it is so ad-strewn and cluttered that I can’t see using it for class materials-YMMV. (Skip to the bottom for the short answer.)

I’ve also had a look at the terms of service, and it looks like Markus Weiland’s assessment that “the terms of use get worse the closer a service’s name is to the end of the alphabet, with Vimeo and YouTube being last in line by claiming significant rights from users for their own purposes” still holds more or less true (which is one factor that led me to sign up with blip.tv 3 years ago).

Youtube is the dominant service, with over a billion page views per day. Unlike other services, it doesn’t use the freemium model. Accounts are free, and all revenue comes from advertising. If a user has enough views on a regular basis, Youtube may offer a partner account to allow ad revenue sharing, but otherwise, users have no control over advertising that may appear alongside their videos. Youtube’s biggest strength is its ease of use. It has apps for smartphones to allow shooting and uploading directly from users’ phones, and it even has basic editing functionality built into the website. It supports streaming in high definition and on mobile devices. Youtube also does a good job of supporting captioning for videos and even does automatic machine-transcribed captions (with varying success). The services Youtube provides are somewhat offset by some of its terms of service and privacy policies.  It will be part of Google’s new privacy policy that goes into effect in a couple of weeks that will allow sharing data and data mining of everything its users do. Youtube also claims more rights to your works than other services, and it has a content fingerprinting system that sometimes interferes with Fair Use rights by blocking uses of copyrighted works that its algorithm detects.

Vimeo and blip.tv both operate on a freemium model (like Flickr), offering basic services for free, but charging for upgrades. Blip.tv has slightly better terms than Vimeo (but neither is too terribly objectionable from my perspective). Their freemium models are sort of mirror images. Vimeo offers HD streaming to all its users, but limits the number and size of uploads per week. Blip.tv offers unlimited uploads (with a limit of 1GB per video), but limits free users to SD streaming and requires a paid account for HD streaming.

Vimeo and blip.tv also differ on their advertising policies, though both derive revenue partially from subscriptions and partially from advertising. On Vimeo, paid subscribers don’t see ads when they are logged in, but have no control over the ads that others see alongside their videos. On blip.tv, users have the option to opt out of ads appearing with their videos entirely, or to select preroll, postroll, or overlay ads. To provide an incentive to users to allow advertising, blip.tv splits all ad revenue 50-50 with users.

Finally, one other option for video hosting that many people overlook is Archive.org. Archive.org provides free accounts with no readily apparent limits on bandwidth or storage space. They provide streaming in HD, an embeddable player, re-encode videos to multiple formats, and allow viewers to download files. The purpose of Archive.org is different from the other video sharing sites: rather than being a sharing service, Archive.org is a virtual library. Rather than having terms of service like Youtube, Vimeo, or blip.tv, they follow the Oakland Archive Policy. In other words, while they don’t claim rights to works that you upload, they do have a preference for keeping a copy archived. There’s no simple way to delete your video if you decide you no longer want it hosted. To have an item removed, you must email them and ask to have it removed. Additionally, the request to remove the item must come from the same email account from which it was uploaded, so it would appear that if you change email accounts, you might not be able to have videos removed in the future.

tl;dr:

• Use Youtube if you want ease of use and maximum potential views for your video and don’t mind Google’s privacy policy and Youtube’s terms of service.
• Use Vimeo if you don’t want to use Youtube and value HD streaming more than unlimited uploads.
• Use blip.tv if you don’t want to use Youtube and are more cuncerned with unlimited uploads than HD streaming.
• Use Archive.org if you want your work archived for future generations and have a strong aversion to commercial enterprises.