Paid Membership site with YouTube/Vimeo etc hosted videos

I use Vimeo to host videos, then Amember for the membership side of things. I'm sure it would be easy to embed videos from the other platforms.

It happens quite a lot - there are a number of WSOs that use unlisted YouTube videos as their video host.

I guess YouTube could algorithmically figure out those were all being clicked from the same place but how easily they could tell whether the link was from behind a paywall and therefore breaking their terms and conditions is a risk you'd be taking.

Of course, a bigger risk is that people would share the unlisted video - the embed code is still available on all the ones I've seen.

Hi Mo, you could certainly use Youtube to host your videos but not only does it violate YouTube's T&C, it also looks tacky for members.

YouTube is inextricably linked with 'free' in the minds of the people. And they'll be able to grab the URL and share it with others.

Why not simply go the extra few steps and upload your videos to Amazon S3, activate CloudFront on the bucket containing your videos, and then serve the videos properly in your members area?

There's an excellent free plugin called S3Bubble that works well for this. Only complaint is it doesn't auto-generate a thumbnail so you'll have to pick the thumbs yourself.

I think this will look much more professional.

As vtotheyouknow says above, people associate YT with free.

In your position, I would save the videos as MP4's and run the video through handbrake to keep the video file size down; upload them to either my own VPS server, or to Amazon S3; install
JW Player as my player of choice, and host each video on a separate page. I'd also watermark the videos, so if they get downloaded and shared, people will know there they came from.

I used Amazon S3 to host my videos, had no problems

Thanks for all your responses - very much appreciated - I am very familiar with the S3 / unlisted route - watermarking, copyright protection, Handbrake etc.

And I really get the YT is FREE perspective (the other channels too).

My selling point for this site is that it will be the biggest collection of videos in a certain niche from YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion & Metacafe (only a few of them will actually be mine)... 'all in one easy to use mobile friendly website'

The site will be categorized and tagged for fast easy access to collections of specific tutorials and demos, will have a 'Favourites' page, where you can save your own faves, will also have overall user favourites, pages of thumbnails, all videos rated, reportable posts if any problems - many other features too - that someone who is crazy about this subject matter will no doubt find useful over and above the inconvenience of signing up with four video platforms, bookmarking individual videos, collecting and creating groups etc...

This will be all in one.

I know it will attract members as someone else I know has done exactly the same for this niche on a much smaller scale and has a few thousand members.

None of this changes the T&Cs, I know... :-)

Any further thoughts?

Why would someone PAY to become a member of your site, when they can find out all this information for free, just by doing a search in Google or setting up a Google Alert for the relevant keywords?