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In bed with YouTube

BY J. CARLTON COLLINS, CPA

Please note: This item is from our archives and was published in 2014. It is provided for historical reference. The content may be out of date and links may no longer function.

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Q: I recently produced several professional videos promoting our company’s services, and I’ve uploaded them on our webpage. Unfortunately, our website is hosted by one of those inexpensive web-hosting companies with a bare minimum of performance and internet bandwidth; therefore, our new videos take forever to load, and once they start playing, they stream inconsistently, pausing every six seconds or so to buffer the video stream. I am disappointed with these results, and I assume that I need to upgrade to a better web-hosting service. Can you recommend a good web-hosting service that supports faster video playback?

A: The problem is not your web-hosting service; it is the approach you used for uploading the videos. Instead of uploading videos to, and running them from, your website, you should upload them to YouTube (or any similar video website) and embed them on your webpage. The videos will look as if they are hosted and running from your website, even though they are actually hosted on and running from YouTube’s website. Steps for uploading and embedding a video to your website are as follows.

1. To create a free YouTube account at youtube.com, click the Sign in button in the top-right corner, then under the fields that ask for login information, click Create an account, and follow the instructions for setting up a new account. Upon completion, sign in to your YouTube account.

2. On the YouTube webpage, click the Upload button, click the large arrow icon labeled Select files to upload, and then browse to and select the video you want to upload. The upload process will start automatically.

 

3. As your video is uploading, a Basic info page is displayed, allowing you to add or edit the video’s Title, Description, Tags, Privacy settings, Category, and default Thumbnail image. Clicking the Advanced settings button reveals additional options for setting the Video location and Recording date, and also for controlling Comments, Ratings, License, Syndication, Captions, Embedding, Subscriber notifications, Age restrictions, 3D effects, and Video statistics settings.

 

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4. Once the video has been uploaded, click the video (in either YouTube’s Dashboard or Video Manager view) to play it on YouTube.

5. With the video displayed on the YouTube screen, click Share, Embed to display its embed code, select the embed code, right-click atop the embed code, and then select Copy (as pictured below).

 

6. Using your web editing tool (I use Microsoft Expression Web, which can be downloaded free at tinyurl.com/dxr6u7g), open your webpage and position the cursor where you want the video to play, and then click Code to display the webpage’s HTML code view (as shown below). Then paste the embed code (being careful not to reposition your cursor), and save your webpage.

 

Thereafter, your video will appear to play seamlessly from your webpage with good performance (subject to the viewer’s internet speed), while the video is actually hosted by and playing from the YouTube website. You can view an example embedded video (as described above) at tinyurl.com/l2lfuet. (This webpage is hosted by GoDaddy.com on my asaresearch.com website, which costs me about $39 a year.)