Creating your own video channel – Introduction -revised

Setting up your own video channel sounds expensive, a lot of work and really complicated, but it is not as hard as it sounds and it certainly does not cost a lot of money. In fact, it is very cheap if you know where to go and how to do it! Apart from creating your videos (obviously), it consists of 4 steps which are explained in great detail.

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Definition of a video channel

I sometimes refer to YouTube, Brightcove, VideoJug, MySpace etc.. as video channels, but they are actually Video Portals (or networks if you like), containing video channels. In the context of this tutorial, I mean that you can have your own video channel, like you can have it on YouTube, with a couple of differences:

• You are in total control over the quality.
• No redirects to the video portal as is the case with YouTube and most others if you click on the view window in the player.
• You are in total control over the video player, which has the same options as most video channels.
• You are in total control over the look of the site and you add features as you see fit.

To be fair on the video portals, there are downsides to having your own channel:

• You do not get traffic from your favorite video portal, unless you create special promotion videos which you upload there (I would recommend that in any case).
• You do not get into the featured videos of your favorite video portal, unless you keep creating specials for that portal in order to get traffic to your site (again, I would recommend doing that).
• If your videos are immensely popular and therefore use up more then 5 Terrabytes bandwidth per month, you may have unexpected extra costs.

5 Terrabytes is like having 100 videos of 10Mb each and those can be watched once by 5,000 visitors during a month. Depending on the compression and size, a video of 10mb can contain about 10minutes of video, to give you an idea. So, in normal circumstances, if you are not a famous star, you have enough reserve to have about 100 videos on your site and given the fact that not every visitor is going to watch 100 videos, you probably can say that about 20,000 visitors a month will not exceed 5Terrabytes bandwidth. Does that sound good to you?