Video hosting service

Impetus

Because many users do not have unlimited web space, either as a paid service, or through an ISP offering, video hosting services are becoming increasingly popular, especially with the explosion in popularity of blogs, forums, and other interactive pages.

The mass market for camera phones has increased the supply of user-generated video. Traditional methods of personal video distribution, such as making a DVD to show to friends at home, are unsuited to the low resolution and high volume of camera phone clips. In contrast, current broadband Internet connections are well suited to serving the quality of video shot on mobile phones. Most people do not own web servers, and this has created demand for user-generated video content hosting, which the likes of YouTube are catering to.

Purpose of Video Hosts (for users)

* Save on bandwidth costs, often eliminating costs entirely
* Creating a common place
* Make a hassle-free experience, where uploading a video and streaming or embedding would normally require advanced programming knowledge. It is now commonly achieved through a web browser, with little or no programming experience.

Copyright issues

Wikipedia hosts around 200 videos in the Ogg format on its servers. Wikipedia actively discourages non-free videos and formats: videos added to Wikipedia are supposed to be freely available for reuse. This contrasts with video hosting services such as YouTube, which can hold copyrighted material, though some rights must be given up to such companies in return for the hosting.

Mobile video hosting

Main article: Mobile Web content management system

A more recent application of the video hosting services is in the Mobile Web arena, where video and other mobile content can be delivered to, and easily accessed by mobile devices. While video-hosting services such as YouTube have developed means by which video can be watched on mobile devices, mobile-oriented web-based frontends for video hosting services that possess equal access and capability to desktop-oriented web services have yet to be developed.