Creating Your Own Video Website

Are you intending to upload video? You can use Wordpress + Vimeo if you're looking to just feature content. Creating YouTube videos that simply point to that content may be an option as well.

It's not the cost, it's the upkeep!

Building a video upload site would be pretty simple, you could probably piece one together easily for a few dollars (or a few hundred dollars if you're not tech savvy). You could even use a WordPress site and a 'tube template" although there are much better ways of doing it.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The real cost would be maintaining it. The cost of the storage and bandwidth to keep it going. Amazon s3 and Cloudfront come to mind as good solutions for that. If you get any traffic at all you can forget using cheap shared hosting plans. And if you allow users to embed videos on their sites as YouTube does you would be eating that bandwidth cost as well.

And then there's the issue of copyright infringements - I'm assuming here that by "video upload site" you are speaking of creating a YouTube rival and allowing other users to upload video. Just like YouTube you would have to police the content to ensure that you aren't in violation of anyone's copyrights, and you'd need to respond to DMCA takedown notices.

Of course if you really meant "can I host my OWN videos only on my site" then it's a different story - again S3 & Cloudfront or perhaps Vimeo Pro is a good solution for you.

Good luck with it!

Bill

What were you flagged for? Copyright infringement?

If you want to actually stream video yourself you need a dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance running a media server application like Wowza Media Server. Wowza is $55 a month if you run it on your own server. There is a special Wowza AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to use if you use EC2 and the price is somewhat different since you'll need to pay to have the EC2 instance online as well.

Wowza: Streaming Media, Video Server Software | Wowza Media Systems

There are other options like Red5 and Adobe Flash Media server.

You're much better off streaming from a 3rd party service.

It can be done but it's going to be very hard to make it successful to compete against sites like Youtube and Dailymotion. But you can try:rolleyes:

I would agree with Bill!
Creating an video uploading site like youtube, vimeo, etc is pretty simple and wouldn't cost you a lot of money. You can hire warriors to do that. But the thing is, maintaining and providing enough bandwidth for your videos storage is the main issue their and I think it will cost you lots of money.