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Ask HN: Where to host video for landing pages

7 points by sashthebash ↗ HN
I am just in the process of creating a screencast/product intro for a landing page but don't know where to host it.

Should I host it myself or with a provider? Which provider is good? Are there any good tools to track the views of the video and maybe at what time people stopped watching?

I would think having a YouTube logo or something similar on the video looks unprofessional, but maybe it also increases conversions? Is there any data about this?

8 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] thread
wmboy
Host the video file on Amazon S3 and then use something like JWPlayer to show the video on your website.
staunch
S3 + Cloudfront. Many people use Vimeo as well, which has minimal branding and supports high quality.

I haven't actually used them myself, but Wistia does deep tracking of plays.

arn
I have no data on this. But I don't find using YouTube unprofessional. Also, I'm not sure how embeddable your video will be, but as a blogger, I much prefer people using YouTube so those videos can be embedded easily, and playable on iOS devices.
robflynn
I have always used Vimeo on the past for this sort of thing.

I definitely prefer it over youtube based on quality of video, bandwidth (a lot of youtube videos that I try suffer from playback issues), and branding.

Hosting on S3 or some other CDN is also an option if you don't mind paying a bit.

pokoleo
I personally hate vimeo because of their horrible fallback & lack of some forms of IE support.

If you're using IE without flash installed (in my experience), it defaults to a black background with black text on top. great user experience.

ohashi
Vimeo is a pretty good option.
psg
I've used YouTube for some video hosting on my website and don't believe it to be unprofessional. In fact, when requesting feedback on a landing page which showed the video, I never received a comment that would have implied YouTube hosting was anything other then acceptable.