Hats off to Bruce Wedding from Mexico for some brutal, “just get it done” talk on a recent WF post:
Quit screwing around and get an Amazon S3 account. There’s no money down, no monthly commitment, just pay for what you use at DIRT cheap rates. I’d be surprised if your bill is more than $1 a month. After that, produce MP4 files, upload using the S3 Organizer Add-in for Firefox, set the ACL to everybody and copy the url to the clipboard. Install the JW Player plugin for your blog and use the shortcode: [jwplayer config=”myplayer” file=”myamazonurl.com/bucket/video.mp4″]
Done.
If you want more protection, use S2Member and they have built in ways to really lockdown your videos making them impossible to share and very hard to download.
Can’t get much clearer than that!
Thanks Bruce. I had a similar issue about hosting videos offline when my government clients locked down access to YouTube. Now, I’m sorted.
Oh, and another cloud host service to watch is MaxCDN – annual rate but competitive. There are a TON of cloud hosts around now. Amazon seems to be (a) built for the job and easy to load/stream video (b) around for the long haul which means my assets won’t disappear into the ether (I hope).
I tried S2 but opted for WishList Member. They seem to have the membership site space locked down but S2 had some good features.
CHECKLIST:
- Get Amazon S3 account
- Configure a ‘bucket’ (read ‘folder’)
- Produce videos in mp4 format
- Install S3 Organizer Add-in for Firefox
- Upload videos to bucket
- set the ACL to everybody
- Copy URL to Notepad
- Install video plugin (I use FV Flowplayer)
- Use the shortcode [flowplayer src=yourvideo.mp4]
- Test