The video-uploading services like YouTube are taking a big part in the history of the web 2.0. Many people became popular for just uploading a weird video on such a site. So I want to give you a short overview of some big video-sharing services. I compared 7 videoportals in the categories quality and community. I’ve chosen 5 well-known and 2 special-interests portals. I know there are a lot of other good videosites on the internet and maybe, I present them in another article.
YouTube
If someone talks about video-upload services, the first site everyone mentions is Youtube. It was the first big one and has the largest community. And to reach a wide audience, you should upload your video to this portal. Uploaded videos can have a maximum size of 100MB and a maximum length of 10minutes. The allowed formats are: .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg. The quality you can present a video is acceptable but there are better services for high quality videos on the WWW (e.g. Stage6).
myspacetv.com
A few month ago MySpace joined the group of videoportals with their new project MySpaceTV. MySpaceTV has a clearly structured menu and all functions you need for watching a video, e.g. fullscreen. Nevertheless I’m really disappointed of MySpace because they copied a lot of things from YouTube. (Netdesignz.de has a comparison of the two portals. It’s a German blog but the pictures show it all.)
Google Video
Google Video is similar to Youtube but it doesn’t has such a big community. The conditions a video must keep are similar to YouTube. (Both sites, YouTube and Google Video, belong to Google, Inc.)
Yahoo! Video
Yahoo! Video is a videoportal by Yahoo! with more than 820Million videos uploaded (that number is from November 2006 - I couldn’t find any newer). In comparison to GoogleVideo Yahoo!Video has a very good design. Also the menu is better and Yahoo! Video offers many features a videocommunities need (e.g. favorites, tags and channels) and so it’s definitively the better choice. Same quality as most flash-enabled sites, large community and an intuitive, clear design.
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a videportal, based in France. In comparison with other flash-enabled sites it has a appreciable better quality. Also Dailymotion allows you to upload 20minutes lasting videos with a size of 150MB. It support the same file-formats as YouTube but with higher resolutions.
2 ‘HD’-Video Portals
Stage6
A videoportal with a great quality and a fast connection - Stage6. Stage6 just supports Divx because it’s a project of DivX.com but that is enough. It’s still a small site but it’s growing. It offers a great quality in combination with fast streaming, which make this startup my personal favorite.
videocommunity
Videocommunity also is a relative small video-uploading service but as Stage6 it’s one of the #1 choices for quality-lovers. This site allows you to upload video even in HD-Quality which is a big plus and the downloading speed is fast enough to see a video without breaks what you can’t say about YouTube. Another good aspect of videocommunity is that is supports most of all video formats(avi, mpeg, mov, wmf, wmv, mp4, mp3, wav, aiff, wma). But there are also disadvantages. You are just allowed to upload 6 files a month with a total length of 15 minutes. 15 minutes are enough for homevideos and it’s more than Youtube offers but the 15 minutes-limit counts for all files together.
The Duel:
Quality:
- Stage6 - 10/10
- videocummunity - 9/10
- dailymotion - 7/10
Biggest community:
- Youtube - 10/10
- Yahoo! Video - 8/10
- Dailymotion - 7/10
So you see/read that there are a lot of good and popular videoportals you just need to decide which platform is the best for hosting/presenting your homevideos!
