I don’t know about using S3 (although I’ve used it before) but the disadvantage of that approach is the videos really aren’t optimized for web playback. YouTube and Vimeo are great at optimization.
If YT is providing too much extra junk why not try out Vimeo? Works great for me when embedding videos. No extra junk. Easy links (if you want) for folks to also download the video at their end.
I think they’ve changed some things recently. They used to have a free basic account. I think they still do but don’t really “advertise” it anymore. Find out more here:
The Plus account was $60 for me for a year. Maybe they recently changed: my yearly payments are in July and it was still $60 then. I don’t think a Plus account is needed in your case. It’s “cheap” for me but that’s because I’m an educator and I need to be able to share 1-to-1 videos with some of my students giving feedback to them. So it’s easy for me to have freely available, private links, and other types of access
… and, of course, cost is relative. If it gives you what you really need then even at $7 a month it’s worth it. But that’s dependent, of course, on how much you really need the service (i.e. how many videos, how many new ones each month, etc.)
It’s the bandwidth I’m not sure of. 5g a week went touch the sides, but they say unlimited in the player, but that’s vague, is adding the video to a stack in the player?
I just wish these businesses operated transparent pricing.
Vimeo may have raised their prices recently partly because of the price of YouTube Premium:
I’m not sure what you’re asking. 5 Gb is the upload limit per week. Sometimes I’ve come close but usually not. But how many people view it is unlimited and I’ve never had any problems. It doesn’t really matter if the “play” happens directly at Vimeo or via a stack embed on a website. You can always double-check with them, but playback seems to be a non-issue. It’s the uploading that’s the constraint.
YouTube Premium may also meet your needs (it doesn’t have the security/privacy I need at times) and it’s $12 per month.
But YouTube “regular” is a total mess and I completely get why some of your customers would be upset with it when they are just trying to promote their businesses (i.e. not sell more Taylor Swift albums or whatever else pops up).
Just got the 30 day trial and added a video, soooo much nicer to add and edit videos than the mess that is You Tube. And the final served video looks way better, in terms of less clutter.
If the entire site is less than 100mb you can stick it on Cloudflare with a free account and set up a rule to cache everything. That way the video will be served via their network of servers.
I never actually have a problem serving video direct from the website. I often wonder how compliant external services are with GDPR, since it passes the users IP number and there are often cookies as well. I hate cookie pop ups.
The body charged with enforcing GDPR have said now on more than one occasion that they do not consider cookies identifiable, except in extreme instances.
What they mean by extreme, who knows. Suffice to say, you are very welcome to get overly concerned about GDPR and cookies, but no one else is.
@Fuellemann This is a newsflash for me. I once asked Vimeo about that and they said there was no way to disable cookies. I found that the callouts to external services for their wretched analytics were doubling the site load time. Then they had endless issues with poor quality from their adaptive playback and I ended up ditching it entirely. Using Cloudflare was a vast improvement.
@steveb I don’t worry too much about GDPR, mainly because I build sites to avoid issues. I did have one client though who drove me round the bend with her madness over GDPR. She even scrapped her computer and bought a new one, seeing it as the only way to avoid having data that might breach the regulations. Some people like that then create a goldmine for ambulance chaser lawyers.
I can never comprehend why anyone uses YT - the most hate-filled pots of nastiness on the web and advertising spam constantly.
On the other hand, I have been using Vimeo for 11 years - the figures being banded around are uploads, not bandwidth, which I unlimited. Vimeo is a total joy and great people to deal with. Ideally you need a plus plan for commercial hosting, but it gives wonderful privacy settings and more. I would have no reservations about recommending them to anyone. It just works, no fuss - Oh and the new desktop upload system is a joy to use!