A Trick To Get Private Videos Hosted On Your Site (This Is Crazy!)

[TommyBussey]

Ok, so when I created my first product I had over three hours of video to put in the members area. Obviously, I wanted those videos to only be available to people who purchased the product (so I couldn't use YouTube or something of that nature to put the videos on there and keep them private and viewable to all of my customers).

At that time I couldn't afford video hosting, so I needed to come up with a solution. This solution has let me host videos on my sites and keep them private and viewable by as many people as I want...for only $8 per month.

It's a little technical, but I think you all can get it!

1. Get a Blip.tv Pro account ($8/month) blip.tv (since 2005)
2. Upload a video to your Blip account. Once it finishes uploading, Blip.tv will automatically convert it into a .FLV file. The important thing to that is that you can get the URL of that .FLV file! Simply scroll down to the bottom of that video's page and you will see something like this:

Media

Source - (http://www.blip.tv/blahblahblah.mov)

Web - (http://www.blip.tv/blahblahblah.FLV)

Thumbnail - (http://www.blip.tv/blahblahblah.jpg)

So, once you have that Web Url that ends in .FLV you want to copy and paste that into TextEdit (Mac) or Notepad (PC) for later.

3. Download a third-party FLV player like the JW FLV player or the Flowplayer.

4. Follow the instructions to install and use the player on your sites (these are given to you when you download and are pretty easy, basic FTP processes.)

5. Once you have the code for the player on your site, you paste the URL from above that ends in .FLV into the appropriate area. Here's an example:

<embed
src="http://www.yourdomain.com/player.swf"
width="640"
height="360"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
flashvars="file=http://blip.tv/yadayada/yourvideo.flv&autostart=true&skin=/snel.swf"
/>

The red text is where you would paste your .FLV file. I added the
variable "&autostart=true" so that my video would play automatically.
And the variable "/snel.swf" for a custom player skin.

Anyways that is a great method to use for $8/month private video hosting
if you are a little low on cash.

Hope you enjoyed this!

-Tommy

[freudianslip27]

This is very cool. What kind of bandwidth restrictions are there with your plan? Video can add up pretty quick.

Matt

[TommyBussey]

So far I have about 30 videos on there (some are as long as 15 minutes) and have hundreds of plays for about 25% of those (some were just test videos). Anyways, I haven't run into any problems yet.

This is a great way to get started with video marketing on your site. Now, I will be able to afford video hosting once I'm required to do so

Originally Posted by freudianslip27

This is very cool. What kind of bandwidth restrictions are there with your plan? Video can add up pretty quick.

Matt

[avenuegirl]

I wonder how cost effective this is compared to hosting at amazon.

There is a video player in the WSOs right now (I already got mine and it is cheaper than JW and does a whole lot more)

I have not gone through the whole package yet, but it is advocating hosting on Amazon.

I have only experimented with amazon, and I think over the course of the past year, I have maybe been billed .25 - if that, LOL

But again, this is just a couple of test videos I popped up.

Are the Blip videos available to all users on the site?

[actionplanbiz]

GVO is now Live but still in prelaunch. they are an MLM company.

heres what you get:

Web Hosting "the Guru's Use"
an Autoresponder that rivals Aweber
Your Own Video Conferencing Room
Video Hosting
and a bunch more stuff

all for only $44 a month after a $1 14 day trial

thats a Huge Deal...

[TommyBussey]

There's no doubt there are better solutions out there. At the time, this is just what I had to do haha

If you have the Blip Pro account you can mark the videos as "Private" and they won't be visible in any type of search results, etc. However, if you use the process I described above with the FLV url, then anyone that goes to your site or members area can view the videos no problem.

Originally Posted by avenuegirl

I wonder how cost effective this is compared to hosting at amazon.

There is a video player in the WSOs right now (I already got mine and it is cheaper than JW and does a whole lot more)

I have not gone through the whole package yet, but it is advocating hosting on Amazon.

I have only experimented with amazon, and I think over the course of the past year, I have maybe been billed .25 - if that, LOL

But again, this is just a couple of test videos I popped up.

Are the Blip videos available to all users on the site?

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Why not just host them on the same site where you install the player? I'm not seeing the benefit of putting them on the Blip site.

[TommyBussey]

I couldn't do that because my site hosting didn't have enough bandwidth and also I had no way to convert my .mov's into .flv's. I kinda just scraped this "jimmy-rig" together to make do with what I had to work with haha...

Originally Posted by Steven Carl Kelly

Why not just host them on the same site where you install the player? I'm not seeing the benefit of putting them on the Blip site.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

You need a new host!

[Josh Anderson]

Not enough bandwidth?

Web Hosting by PowWeb - One Plan, One Price unlimited bandwidth colocated hosting under $5 a month.
Web Hosting: Website Hosting Solutions - Aplus.net 2 terabytes of bandwidth colocated hosting under $10 a month.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Josh:

OH NO! Not UNLIMITED bandwidth and UNLIMITED disk space! The word should be "unmetered"...