Choosing a hosting platform for your video lessons isn’t as difficult as you might think. There are services like Vimeo, Amazon AWS, and others that will happily charge you to host your videos. The clear leader in hosting videos is YouTube.
Choosing a Hosting Platform
You will need a place to host your videos. This takes the burden of storing your videos away from your learning management system. The most obvious (and free) place to host your videos is on YouTube. Because of this, it makes sense to optimize your videos for YouTube.
YouTube is your best option for video hosting.
Advantages of Using YouTube
Portability
You can post or embed YouTube videos to your LMS or own website. Email links to YouTube videos are easy to create. You can also share the links to any social media you use, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you change learning management systems or jobs, you don’t have to worry about downloading and re-uploading your videos.
File Size
Videos can have very large file sizes. By hosting your video lessons on YouTube, you don’t have to worry about overburdening your learning management system. The links you create to YouTube take up almost no memory.
Longevity and Cost
YouTube has been around since 2005. It is not going anywhere. Other video hosting sites have come and gone. In addition, there is no cost to using YouTube. Some sites will charge you a monthly fee to host your videos.
Closed Captioning
Because you are an educator, you are required to make sure that your videos have closed captions. YouTube will create reasonable captions, so you don’t have to transcribe your voice. These captions will need to be edited, but the majority of the hard work is already done for you.