Video Hosting Options for WordPress Websites

If you’ve come across Vimeo before and figured it wasn’t for business, think again.

With the advent of the Vimeo Pro edition, for $199/yr you can get HD/full screen video playback with great player customisation.

Free Vimeo accounts are also available – they are ad-supported, and your videos need to be non-commercial to match Vimeo’s TOS.

You can embed a YouTube video in any blog post or page:

• Get the URL for the YouTube video – watch the video on the YouTube site and you’ll see a URL panel to the top right of the video. Copy the URL (not the embed)
• In your web page or post, paste the URL

Note YouTube accounts are free but are supported by ads – you don’t have control over which ads will display with your videos.

Here is how a directly embedded YouTube link looks:

And this is the result.

Creating and uploading your own video

You can create your own video (or get someone to do it for you) and then upload your video to YouTube. Once on YouTube, it is an easy task to add it to your website.

A lot of people search for video content using YouTube, and your video may draw traffic in its own right. Your post or page will still be indexed by Google, and provides a second chance for your content to be indexed and rank.

To create your own YouTube account, go to YouTube.com and click on the Sign Up link. Once you have an account, follow the Upload Video links to upload your video.

Wistia is … “…video hosting built for business. Engage your prospects, customers, and employees with video..”

A newish video hosting offering, with the added benefit of making it easy to integrate your video into your Campaign Monitor email campaigns (read the Campaign Monitor blog post).

$79/mth for video hosting, $99/mth for the Deluxe plan with email integration.

Viddler is a commercial video hosting service. Create an account, upload your videos and you can embed them in any WordPress page or posts.

A commercial Viddler account starts at around $100/mth.

Like Viddler, Bright Cove is a commercial video hosting service. Create an account, upload your videos and you can embed them in any WordPress page or posts – unlike other ’embeddable’ services, Bright Cove has its own embedding code which you need to access from your account.

A Bright Cove account starts at around $100/mth.

You can include a wide range of ’embeddable’ content such as videos in to your WordPress website simply by copying and pasting the URL in to your web page.

For the services listed below, you can copy the URL of the video and paste it directly in to your web page:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Viddler
• DailyMotion
• blip.tv
• Hulu (US Only)
• Qik
• Google Video
• WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)