Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, GoogleEarth - the list of vendors that allow you to share pictures or video, store them, place them on your website - that list seems to be growing all the time! For some nonprofits, using those tools to promote their mission and to tell their story is both affordable and meets their branding and marketing requirements, too.

Lately, several of our nonprofits customers have asked about hosting their own streaming media files, or using a service to do the same thing. My colleague Rachel Mercer did some great initial homework - and here’s what we found:

One Free Option:

Youtube will let you post and share your video content and display on your website. But you’ll have to live with their file size limit (100mb) and their limit on length of video (10 minutes), and their branding. You can see an example of how Real Change is  using YouTube for their needs.

Hosting Your Own:

Say the word expensive, just to get started. You’ll need a server, you’ll need expertise in hosting a webserver, you’ll need to learn how to encode your video content, you’ll need to pay for the additional bandwidth, and you’ll likely need ongoing maintenance. We haven’t created a fully tested shopping cart, because there are so many variables:

• How long are your videos?
• How many concurrent users will you have?
• How much data will you have to pay for?

But you’ll want a decent server - and those start in the $3,000 - $4,000 range if you are buying new.

Using a Service:

This can be a great, middle of the road option - someone else maintains the server, provides backup and encoding assistance, manages how much data you’ll need and more. Again, though - your pricing structure will vary based on concurrent use, bandwidth charges and so on.

How To Learn More/Next Steps

1. Spend some time working with your internal team defining your needs. How much video, how many users, what should you do about your brand, what are the up-front and ongoing costs. And consider a pilot project - if you can get your video on YouTube without expending a lot of effort - you may be able to gather a lot of information about how streaming may work for your agency.

2. Read up! Techsoup has a great article with more information!