Hosting video in a membership area

Or get a server with FFMpeg and host them yourself. It's pretty easy.

yes, hosting them on Amazon is a good idea -
Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing: Compute, Storage, Database
You will also need to obscure the video url - wishlist may have this feature

You can put them on YouTube and set it to private.

That's what I'm doing. Works just fine.

Definitely recommend amazon s3 for an awesome user experience.

It all depends on how secure you want the video streams to be.

Wishlist protects access to the WP posts and pages inside your membership, but not to whatever you link to (or embed) inside the content.

For example, a page at .com/members/video1 is protected by Wishlist. Any outbound link to a video file on that page is NOT protected... at least not without an additional plugin to encrypt or otherwise obfuscate the video file URL.

The smart move is to get yourself an Amazon S3 account to serve your videos (more on this below) and a good video player plugin to play them inside WP - best of all if your chosen video player is already integrated with Amazon S3. I prefer EasyVideoPlayer, there are many others.

This may sound complicated, but once you've got everything set up, it's pretty simple.

If you want to keep your videos out of search engine listings (including YouTube), but aren't particularly worried about keeping them under lock and key - embedding "Unlisted" YouTube videos will work. However, the link to the video on YT is right at the top of the video and all someone has to do is click through and copy the URL to share it.

Expect to pay the price for success if you stream your video files from the same server your Wordpress install runs on. Under low traffic loads, you'll be fine... but it doesn't take very many concurrent connections to bring most cheap shared hosting accounts to their knees. Many "unlimited" hosting plans actually barf at more than 25 concurrent connections... and remember that WP and Wishlist (and your theme) are all hitting your server for data on every page view - PLUS whatever bandwidth your videos require.

This is where Amazon S3 comes in... you can store all of your video, audio and images in your S3 "bucket" for your membership site and you'll take a tremendous strain off of your server's (probably limited) resources.

Bottom line here is... don't let this stop you from moving forward, just know that if your membership site starts doing well, you'll want to re-invest some profits into a more substantial infrastructure (VPS or Dedicated Server and S3 etc).

Hope this helps,

Brian

I'm currently in the process of setting up a members area with streaming videos and have done quite a bit of research.

I've decided to go with OptimizePress for the front end, S2 Members to handle membership and AWS/Cloudfront for the streaming. I've used AWS for years to stream content and always found them to be super reliable and pretty fast... much faster than YouTube actually... at least for me that is.

Can be a bit tricky figuring it all out but once you've got it sorted out you've got a pretty sweet set up.

And with my monthly bills from AWS for streaming running me at under $1, the price is pretty good too

Steve

You don't have to host them privately on vimeo or youtube.

What you need to do is just produce the videos from camtasia studio and then upload all of them into a folder located at your wordpress blog and use the lightbox plus plugin to enable the popup style when a link is clicked from the member's area.

I did this way for all my membership sites and it worked like a charm without much technical knowledge needed.

I have all of the training videos in my members area (which is powered by Wishlist) hosted with SproutVideo.com and I would highly recommend their service. They let you control which domains your videos are playable on so people can not share the links.

Check out - Video Hosting for Business

They are a little expensive, but will make your life a lot easier when it comes to videos and video marketing on your websites.