YouTube is everywhere - you see videos as a common part of websites, and almost everyone has an internet connection with high enough bandwidth to play video. This means that a lot of nonprofits are interested in having video on their sites.
So what does it take, and what considerations should you think about as you embark on adding video to your site?
First, it is always a mistake to upload a video to your website without thinking about the ramifications, both in terms of bandwidth, as well as performance. If you have a standard hosting account, or even a VPS (Virtual Private Server) do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make sure you won't end up with sticker shock at the end of the month.
Video is very bandwidth intensive. It is not at all difficult to overshoot your bandwidth limitations on your hosting account with one short video on your home page. A client of mine put a short video on their home page after election day, and we had to take it down a week later, or else they would have started to have to pay for extra bandwidth. Take your average traffic for the page you'll add the video on, and multiply by the size of the video. For instance, if you have a 3MB video, and you get 1,000 visits per day on that page, that's potentially using 3,000 MB (3 GB) of bandwidth (of course, most people won't play through the entire video, etc. but that's the place to start.) And 3 GB of bandwidth for a month will exceed the bandwidth limits of many virtual hosting plans. In terms of performance, lots of people streaming a video from your website can bring a webserver to its knees. If that video is more popular than you expected, you may end up paying for it, both literally and figuratively.
What about putting it somewhere else? YouTube is the easy answer. Google pays the hosting costs, you get easily embeddable video that can be viral, and you can drive traffic from YouTube to your site. But what if it's not a public video (perhaps you want to provide video for your members only, for instance) or you want to stream live, or use a different format than flash? There are a number of services you can pay for.
StreamGuys and
Limelight Networks are two examples of companies that can provide that sort of service for you.
Putting video on your website takes both strategic thinking (why are we doing this? What are the goals?) as well as tactical, technical thinking (what's the best way to get this video to the eyeballs that we want to see it?)
