- Do you have a site where users are demanding video sharing functionality?
- Do you have an idea for a new type of YouTube clone that will make you money?
- Do you know of a particular niche/subject that there is a strong demand for a niche video sharing site?
If you have answered yes to any of these questions then you are probably looking to find a way to develop your own video sharing site. There are two ways that you can go about building your own YouTube site:
- Use an outsourcing company like Rentacoder.com to hire a freelance web developer. This option will cost you thousands of dollars to get done properly.
- Have the video sharing site built from an existing script that gives you all the functionality you’d expect from a YouTube clone.
Option 2 is obviously the quicker, most cost effective and efficient way of building your own video sharing site. Basically it allows you to buy your own pre-packaged YouTube Clone and build it almost instantly.
You may still want to outsource the design of your video sharing site once it is up and running to make it more appealing and branded.
Video Sharing is Big Money
YouTube has become an immensely successful site. It now sees over 30 million visitors a month and in 2006 it was sold to Google for $1.77 billion dollars.
Online video is an absolutely huge and growing market and there are plenty of YouTube clones out there that are very successful. Let me name a just a few:
- Metacafe: 10-25 million unique visitors a month
- Daily Motion: 15-20 million unique visitors a month
- Break.com: Estimated 10 million unique visitors a month
- JumpCut.com: Estimated 0.5 – 5 million visitors a month
- Revver: Estimated 2 – 5 million visitors a month
Go Niche!
While general video sharing sites are definitely extremely popular it is also a very competitive market to enter. However, that does not mean there is no room for more video sharing sites, there are plenty of huge opportunities in making niche video sharing websites.
Let me give you some examples of previous successes:
- Travelistic: Travel and holiday videos - Estimated 0.3 – 2 million visitors a month.
- Stupid Videos: Comedy Videos - 5-7 million unique visitors a month
- GodTube: Christian videos - Estimated 0.3 – 2 million visitors a month.
- Expert Village: How-to videos - Estimated 0.3 – 2 million visitors a month.
These sites are by no means small and are getting a lot of attention in their respective niches.
If you feel you have a niche that will truly benefit from a video sharing portal then you definitely want to grab the bull by the horns and get building your own niche YouTube clone straight away before a competitor does.
Considerations for a Video Sharing Script
There are plenty of scripts out there and some of them are very cheap, but you must takes these following points into consideration or you will be very disappointed.
- Is the script secure?
You need to be sure that the script has been made by a professional and they have ensured the script is difficult to hack. I’ve seen some cheap scripts out there only to find that they have serious security holes.
- Can it deal with high traffic loads?
If the code behind your video sharing site is poorly written it can put a lot of strain on the server hosting your site. Some scripts just aren’t built to scale and if you are planning on getting lots of visitors then you need a quality script that scales.
- Will the script work on your server environment?
Video sharing sites are complex to say the least and many of the scripts will only work in certain server environments and if it hasn’t been tested on your server then it is difficult to know that once you’ve bought it whether it will actually work.
- Can your server cope with the load of a video sharing site?
Having videos uploaded to your site, converted into the correct format by your server, and then redistributed to all your visitors is a hefty task for a server so you need to take this into consideration. A specialist company that offers a video sharing script will be able to advise you correctly on your server needs.
Recommended Video Sharing Script
After checking out all the various video sharing scripts I found only one which passed all my quality checkpoints.
- It was secure.
- It was made by a professional.
- It worked and did everything a video sharing website should do.
- It was scalable to cope with high traffic
- It was installed on a server provided by the company. This gave the video sharing site a secure and scalable environment to ensure everything worked as it should.
The script is Video Share from GetYouTube.
Click here to get this highly recommended Video Sharing Script
About GetYouTube
This software allows you to run your own YouTube or internet "TV" Channel to serve and watch videos as uploaded by internet users.
The getyoutube.com platform is a full featured video portal giving viewers, content creators and site owners a comprehensive tool to upload, view, share, manage, comment and moderate videos. getyoutube.com users are a network of partners that manage video portals under their own web site address and branding. getyoutube.com works in conjunction with these site owners to provide their users a complete video service, including hosting.
THE SECRET OTHER SCRIPTS LACK
What most wont tell you is the easy part is getting some sytems to run the site, the hard part is getting the site hosted where the encoding works and the servers can manage the load. Most are not equipped for whats needed to convert the files, or enough horse power to run several accounts on one server (shared hosting)
Most will eventually need a dedicated server, or even a string of servers, better known as a cluster.
MAKE SURE you have a hosting company that can handle the usage if your site takes off and gets busy. You dont want it to crash. Encoding video takes a LOT of processing and storage. GetYouTube.com proudly uses FLV Hosting Data Center.
FEATURES:
Video Encoding
Users submit videos in any of dozens of different formats from MPEG1/2/4, Divx, 3ivx, Windows Media 7/8/9, Quicktime, These videos are at varying bit rates up to 10 Mbps. The vast majority of these videos are not in a format that can readily be streamed and must be converted to a common format to ensure a good experience for the user.
User Uploads
Users can easily sign up for an account and upload their videos and be notified via email after the video has been encoded into Flash and is ready for viewing.
Advertising Support
getyoutube.com can either run with or without advertising depending on the needs of the Site Owner. Additionally Site Owners wishing to run advertising are allowed to use our existing advertising engine and dynamic insertion technology.
getyoutube.com has been certified to run video ads. In addition custom in-stream ads can be placed in the system without the need for working with any third parties. Additionally third party banner ads are fully supported.
User Comments
Users have the ability to comment on individual videos. Users’ email addresses are verified before any post is made and vulgar language is automatically removed. All user comments can be easily edited or deleted by administrators.
User Ratings
Users can rate a video on scale of 1 to 5 stars and the results are automatically updated throughout the day allowing users to easily spot videos that others feel is the best.
Uploads
Our experience has shown that simply showing videos that have been matched the most over time results in a very stale home page, ultimately resulting in users becoming bored and not returning. The hottest uploads are calculated hourly to expose content that has been watched the most recently.
Folders
As a system grows with new content it is very easy for content to get buried. Our system automatically places videos into pre-defined folders based on specific keywords or tags.
Replication
In order to effectively scale a system with a large amount of content new assets need to be brought online as quickly as possible. getyoutube.com’s platform is designed to scale content across those assets to provide the best user experience possible.
Sharing
Multiple sharing options are given to users who want to share videos on message forums, blogs or their own personal web pages, while still giving the original site complete control over their content along with related advertising revenue.
Click here to get this highly recommended Video Sharing Script
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