I Don’t Want a YouTube Logo on my Video

See below for a new update!

We have had requests from time to time from clients who want video embedded on their site pages, but they do not want a YouTube logo or a link away from their site appearing on it.

To include a self-hosted video on your home page, without any branding on it is, unfortunately, not an easy thing to do.

The reason YouTube is so popular for embedding video is because YouTube makes it gosh darn easy to upload and convert multiple video formats and then embed them on WordPress or other type of web sites. The YouTube servers are very powerful and reliable.

There is an added SEO benefit of having your videos hosted on one of the most frequently visited sites in the world (Although it does YouTube a lot more good than it does you 😉

So YouTube handles the following tasks for free!

• Conversion
• Hosting
• Provide Embed Code

This makes ongoing video promotion – and the likelihood that you will be producing and uploading videos on a regular basis – much easier to accomplish.

The downside for some situations is that you may not want visitors to your site to see a logo and a link away to YouTube, no matter how unobtrusive it might be. The example below shows a YouTube video by that fine upstanding garage band, The Minimum Rage.

Hosting

To embed video that is not hosted on a free external video service, one might think of converting and hosting the video on the same server that one’s website is hosted on.

That is usually fine for a short few minutes of video or two, however with longer videos you would be transferring many hundreds of megabytes (MB) compared to a small amount of kilobytes (KB) a typical web page will contain.

This can lead to bandwidth problems with your host, even if only a small group of people are viewing your video page at the same time.

So, you will need an external hosting service for your videos.

Conversion and Embed Code

Another expense is in converting your raw video format into a web-based format, something that Youtube does on the fly.

Your developer has to install the javascript and embed code or plugin that will display a Flash-based container on your page. That container will add the play and pause buttons to your video file, establishing a user interface. Then the converted video has to be uploaded via FTP.

The container software itself may come in a “free” version that includes a logo and link to the developer’s site and a “commercial” license version that allows no branding or your own custom branding.

The Flash

Unfortunately, there is the lack of support for Flash-based players on some hand-held devices, especially Apple products iPhone and iPad. Support for Flash, which has historically powered most video appearing on web pages, is being phased out and a new standard based on HTML5 is being phased in. Services such as YouTube offer evolving ways to view their video content on these Flash-disabled devices.

There is a chance that the video container you might use to embed your self-hosted video on your home page will display NOTHING unless it provides an alternative display of non-Flash content!

The 3rd Party

There are also 3rd party services that approach video delivery with much more of a marketing angle. They might include the ability to add share and even Buy Now buttons right in the video itself, test market videos etc.. These services are not free and you would still need to have an account on a service like Amazon Web Services to host your videos.

What’s your experience with posting videos on your site?

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Addendum: I was recently contacted by someone who informed me that “One thing I noticed about your article is that a resource by Wikipedia you linked to is slightly outdated and missing some important details.” They included  a link to an article on their site, and I think it’s pretty good. So, you should check it out.