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

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