YouTube Clone Video Sharing Script | Build your own YouTube

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:

1. Use an outsourcing company like vWorker.com to hire a freelance web developer to build your custom video sharing website. This option will cost you thousands of dollars to get done properly.
2. Have the video sharing site built from an existing script like ClipShare 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 (can be done relatively cheaply by finding a designer on vWorker) 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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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 company.
• It worked and did everything a video sharing website should do.
• It was scalable to cope with high traffic
• Help is on offer for installing the script, getting your server ready, or utilizing a high speed server suitable for a video sharing website.

The script is Clipshare.

About ClipShare

ClipShare has a lite and a pro version which are priced at $99 and $199 respectively. Also they offer hosting starting at $2.99 a month scaling up to higher prices as you use more bandwidth.

ClipShare Lite Features:

• Highly Customizable
  ClipShare is fully template driven so you can easily customize the design layout by modifying the template files or integrate with your existing design.
• Real-Time Video Conversion
  Uploaded video files are converted on the fly, allowing your ClipShare website members to stream videos using the built-in flash player with buffer support just like YouTube!
• More than 20 Video Formats supported
  ClipShare is designed to allow your members to upload a wide range of video formats that is supported by the codec library which includes: AVI, WMV, QuickTime, DIVX, MPEG, 3GP, FLV and many more!
• Embeddable Flash Video Player
  Our script features an embeddable flash video player with full-screen support that gives your users the option to easily insert videos on to their web page or MySpace/Friendster profiles. On demand, the Video Player can be rebranded with your logo watermark.
• Video and Profile Rating
  Using AJAX technology, members will be able to instantly rate and comment videos, as well as rating other member profiles.
• Messaging System
  ClipShare also features a built-in messaging system used by members to easily communicate with each other by composing messages and sending to their network of friends.
• Video and Profile Rating
  Not only can you offer free registration for your members like YouTube. We also offer you an extra option to charge membership fees with our automated billing system using Paypal to accept payment from users. Set up unlimited membership plans and charge members according to video upload space and bandwidth usage as well as setting the maximum allowable video upload per account for your free/paid members.

ClipShare Pro Additional Features

• Upload Progress Bar
  
  Getting bored while uploading big files? Then you need this. Live progress bar with several statistics like: Percent, File Size, Downloaded KBytes, Elapsed Time, Estimated Time Left, Estimated Speed (KB/sec).
• Background Process Video Conversion
  
  Video Conversion can now be performed in a background server process. After a successful upload, the member doesn’t have to wait (loading the page) until the conversion process is finished; he is instantly redirected to a Success page, while the video is converted in the background, and will become available on the website when ready. This solves many timeout problems experienced while uploading/converting big files.
• Video Approval
  
  The administrator(s) can now choose to Approve Videos before they appear on the website. This function can be turned on or off.
• RSS Feeds
  
  Offer several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (most recent, top rated, most discussed, etc).
• Member Profile Avatars
  
  Members can now add their picture (avatar) to their profile.
• Video Conversion Configuration
  
  Configure different conversion related settings: video resample, resample width & height, sound quality (rate), video bitrate, delete original videos, etc.
• Stats Box
  
  Show different website stats like: total public videos, total private videos, total members, total online members, etc.

Click here for more info on ClipShare.

Also See

• If you are looking to produce and host your own videos, rather than run a video sharing website, then check out Vzaar.