Video Product - Best Delivery Method?

You can to earn money from your videos? Take a look at CreateSpace for monetizing/selling videos. I think that you can (although I'm not totally positive) self-publish them through Amazon's streaming services through there.

A membership site with videos hosted on Amazon S3.

Costs are low, most I have paid in one month was $3, that was the initial launch of my product , I had around 3 hours of video and around 200 customers in that first month.

Amazon S3, Cloud Computing Storage for Files, Images, Videos

Lots of options here bud.

You should definitely create a membership site, and then I would suggest Wistia or Vimeo for video hosting. Personally I don't know any programming so AMazon was a little complicated for me but I know it does have lots of upside. I went with Vimeo Pro because it was 200 for the year and basically Im getting unlimited video hosting and views. Just my opinion but the 3 most popular for secure video hosting is AMazon S3, Vimeo, and Wistia

I've done something similar.
I host on Amazon S3, but also deliver via DVD using Kunaki
They only take $1 and ship to most countries.,
Sold hundreds of DVD's via their service.

I would say Vimeo, too. I am not quite sure about this but I think, if you are looking for something where you can subscribe to that would actually be worth, Vimeo is a great place to do that (well, for me, at least). The quality of videos on Vimeo is purely sensational.

I would (and do myself) use membership sites and host the download files on Amazon S3.

No one will want to download a 15GB file though so make sure you split it up into several smaller downloads, preferably nothing bigger than 1GB per download. You'll also want to mention the size of the download somewhere on the salespage just incase there are some people who don't want to download a file of that size. That's a fair chunk of the average persons monthly Internet allowance I would imagine.

I would totally build the entire website and membership site with the new OptimizePress 2.0 and WordPress. This thing is amazing and works great for creating high converting sales pages, product launch pages, you name it! It also has a membership feature for protecting content, dripping content over time, etc. If you already have a wordpress site that’s designed, OptimizePress 2.0 has a plugin to turn your site into a sales page/membership area.


Check out OP here: optimizepress.com


If you are looking for other membership products that work with WordPress and/or optimizePress you can look into these: WishList, DAP (Digial Access Pass), aMember Pro.


Oh, one thing about videos… Simply setup a Vimeo account and make the videos private. Then you embed the videos within your protected members area. This way you won’t have to worry about the bandwidth on your server. If you have a successful launch and you get several hundred people or more on your server watching videos it could really make your site slooooow! It could force you to get a dedicated server. So Vimeo Private Videos is the way to go! Visit: vimeo.com


Have a great day - Pete

Hey Mikey,

I've set this kind of thing up several times for myself as well as for business friends.

The cheapest route to go that still provides a great user experience is:

JWPlayer + Amazon CloudFront

Using *just* Amazon S3 isn't ideal. You want to enable CloudFront (no additional charge) because it'll allow your members to seek anywhere within a video, as opposed to waiting for the whole thing to load (which you'll pay for even if they never watch it). In other words, it gives you "true" streaming a la Youtube. It also dynamically loads ONLY the portion of the video that is being watched at a given time, so you only pay for what gets watched, and not what loads but never gets viewed.

Also, I understand wanting to offer your members HD vids, but I'd still recommend compressing them to save on streaming costs. You'll still get amazing quality at a greatly reduced file size. Here are the compression settings I use in Handbrake:

2013-07-16_1638 - VicDorfman's library

These settings also optimize for mobile. And JWPlayer supports HTML5 fallback so if your member is viewing on an iPhone, they'll still be able to see the video.

That's probably the most cost effective way to do things. If you'd rather have it all taken care of for you, and are willing to pay for it, look into Wistia or Vimeo. But considering the ease of setting up JW + CloudFront and how much money it'll save you, I'd personally avoid these hosted options.

I agree with @troy23 - setup an online membership + offer a physical DVD-version.

I've found that offering BOTH something online AND offline help boosting the trust factor and make you come across more like a legitimate business that actually have the bandwidth to ship products.

On top of this, you can usually charge $10-15 more for a DVD version with the same content as your online membership site.