Video is quickly becoming the medium of choice for viral Marketing.

Hundreds of sites are popping up everywhere promising to let you easily upload, broadcast and share your video with millions of viewers.

While YouTube/GoogleVideo remain the largest community, several other video broadcasting sites offer unique benefits.

Here's a brief overview of the top sites we use, along with an explanation of which tool is best for the job -

YouTube / Google Video:
* Largest community
* Limited video formats supported
* 100MB file size limit
* Poor to decent video quality, best suited for wide view
* Does not save video unless cached
* Internal full screen view with distortion of quality

Veoh:
* Upload videos of any format or file size, no restrictions
* External media player for full screen with no loss of quality
* Automatically saves video locally for speedy offline viewing
* Distributes your video to Google Video, YouTube and Yahoo Video
* Superb video quality (but takes a long time to process each new video)
* Supports publishing via RSS

Revver:
* Supports saving videos into collections
* Superb video quality (Better than Veoh), also suited for screen casting
* Ad-driven (an ad is displayed at the end of your video and revenue is split 50/50 between you and Revver)
* Supports .wmv and .mov when uploading files
* Analytics
* RSS feeds by collection (For example: http://api.revver.com/rss/collection/38935/)

ScreenCast:
* Absolute best tool for screencasts, zero distorion of quality
* Instant view after upload (no need to wait for compression)
* No built-in community
* Not free. Costs about $6 per month at the basic package
* Simple interface

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Here at SoftwareProjects, we use video primarily for screencasts (recording screen output), to demo our products, conduct online training or deliver market research data to our clients.

We were initially using YouTube, but the quality loss was so bad we ended up hosting the WMV files on our own servers.

That didn't work very well, as non WMV-compliant browsers couldn't view the videos.

As soon as Veoh came out, we migrated all of our YouTube videos to Veoh and were much happier with the quality. Veoh takes A LOT of time to process each video, but the quality is soooo much better than YouTube.

ScreenCast, a hosted video broadcasting solution by Camtasia, specifically designed to handle screen casts, didn't work too well initially. But thankfully, our friends at Camtasia listened to our feedback, fixed all the kinks and these days - ScreenCast absolutely rocks.

We are in the process of migrating all of our screencasts to ScreenCast.com. Quality is absolutely phenomenal with zero loss of quality, processing time is quick and embedding videos couldn't be easier. ScreenCast is the single solution where you actually have to pay for the service and it doesn't have a built-in community.

Yet it's worth every penny. We will be using ScreenCast to broadcast all of our videos and we're going to continue uploading them to Veoh for the community effect (Veoh can automatically send your videos across YouTube, GoogleVideo and YahooVideo, to do this; Login to your account and click on "Go Pro", you will be taken to a sign up page:
--Complete the information in the form on the right.
Check the box to indicate you are the rights holder to your videos.
Check the box to indicate you agree to our terms of service.
Submit your information by clicking "Apply".
That's it.
You'll get a confirmation email shortly after submitting your information.

The Veoh Pro program is totally free so go ahead and apply and start taking advantage of all the Veoh Pro publisher features!


Here's a comparison of a screencast uploaded to all services I mentioned, so that you can see the quality difference for yourself:

YouTube:



Veoh:



Revver:



ScreenCast:



The next time I'm going to see anyone posting a screen capture using YouTube, I'm going to get very upset! YouTube was simply not designed for screen casts. If paying Camtasia's ScreenCast.com is too much for your budget, use Revver or Veoh.

Adrian - seems like ScreenCast is the only one of the 4 that doesn't get a thumbnail of the video. Any way to set a thumbnail for ScreenCast videos?

You're right Mike, still haven't figured out how to set a thumbnail for ScreenCast vids

Got a response from TechSmith -

"we are working on those (thumbnails), however that is not an option at this time."