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We have developed a great series of videos promoting an investment opportunity for one of our clients. The clients, and investor brokers love it. Now the challenge is how to show it on the website associated with the investment.

Traditionally we would host the videos on an appropriate platform (like YouTube) and then embedd them on our site. This addresses a couple of concerns:

  • Ensures all OS's will be able to view
  • Leverages the bandwidth of the provider rather than ours

But, the client's lawyer has said the videos are promoting an investment (true) and therefore can not be broadcast -- so have to be presented with user access controlled (fair enough)

YouTube private only allows 50 views, and not embedded. So I start looking elsewhere -- but I can't seem to find a service that does the following:

  • Not flash -- needs to be viewed by iPads
  • Third party host site must be password protected while the videos are not when embedded on my site

And just to through a loop into this -- the majority of the investors being solicited are in China-- so the service needs to have servers that can run at appropriate speed from within China.

Have other start ups that have been using video to promote an investment-- yet trying to remain US-SEC compliant found a solution to this issue? Thanks!

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what is the expected band width usage of the videos? – Sunil Nov 4 '11 at 0:14
Great question Sunil-- they are HD videos that are each about 5 minutes long. They are 5 of them. we expect a minimum of 20 views of each per day. – Joseph Barisonzi Nov 4 '11 at 0:25

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Jospeh, with 100 views each day of this shouldn't amount to much bandwidth and would be OK with any host. I would guess if each video was around 20MB then you're looking at 2GB a day (100 views) or 60GB a month... nothing really.

So my recommendation is to "stick" the videos on your own server, protect with usernames and passwords, and find a html5 video player (there are tons out there) to play the videos.

I host at site5 where they have "unlimited bandwidth" (although you can't abuse it). We recently had 3 hours of video (not HD) watched by 1000 odd people over the period of a week.

Site5 charge $5 a month or something crazy... excellent host :) (I think they have a set up in Singapore too.. not at $5... but way closer to China... however I think you'll be OK hosting in the US).

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thank you for the great comment. We have it hosted with a great host in Chicago right now. And you are right-- our bandwidth could probably take it-- except the Chinese investoment brokers are saying it is super slow. Auurgh. – Joseph Barisonzi Nov 4 '11 at 2:14
Your welcome. You could ask the Chinese to ping the host in Chicago and the site5 servers in Singapore (you'll need to ask site5 for an IP address). I doubt you'll see much difference. Try a lower res file. A quick way to do this is upload a HD video to youtube (a sample), and then the client can choose which quality is best for him (240,360,480,720 etc), then you can convert all the vids into the same quality. 5 years ago I aimed for 1 MB per minute. today it's 2-3MB. – Sunil Nov 4 '11 at 2:42
up vote 0 down vote

What about www.screencast.com

(No connection except user)

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