Consider a small business that needs to integrate with a video hosting service that provides API access and the videos to work across all web and mobile devices.
We use Amazon S3/Cloudfront. You could use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert the videos into various formats as well, but we use Encoding.com for that purpose.
We haven't had any issues at all (running this setup since December 2011). Encoding.com has been running since October 2012. They have a feature where you authorize them for an S3 bucket and create a rule that any new files placed in that bucket will get converted based on a config and then uploaded to a different bucket. So when we have new videos, we upload them to one bucket, and within minutes they get converted to webm, ogv, and mp4 and moved to the hosting bucket. The app reads from Cloudfront for either progressive download for HTML5 video, or streaming for Flash. Pretty easy to set up and 0 ongoing maintenance.
I'm an engineer on the Zencoder team, which is an API for the transcoding piece of the puzzle. My company (Brightcove) also has a full video CMS product (Video Cloud), but it's not really geared towards small businesses.
If you want a fairly cheap solution to bootstrap that you control, I'd honestly suggest going the DIY route in terms of hosting / playback and use a service like Zencoder to deal with the transcoding. If you go this route and need a player, I also contribute to the Video.js project :)
Like the previous commenter said, it's not aimed at small businesses. At my last job (ClearChannel), we were considering switching to Brightcove for 38 web properties, including Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Sean Hannity, AT40, and there was a minimum you had to commit to for a contract. Something like Amazon would be ideal since your costs would be pennies to start if you have no traffic. If you are pushing terabytes of video per month, providers like Akamai or Brightcove can do it cheaper if you commit to a minimum level of traffic.
We use Wistia (http://www.wistia.com), and they're absolutely fantastic. Lightning fast loading and amazing performance on mobile. Also would recommend checking into Vimeo Pro.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] threadIf you want a fairly cheap solution to bootstrap that you control, I'd honestly suggest going the DIY route in terms of hosting / playback and use a service like Zencoder to deal with the transcoding. If you go this route and need a player, I also contribute to the Video.js project :)
http://wistia.com/pricing