Videos - Vimeo Cost Overhead

As a refugee from the old Travel Pod that closed in 2017, I've started with TravellersPoint to recreate my old blogs - big job!

But now I've come to my first video insertion. Vimeo wants US$144 per annum to keep a measly 60 videos. And posting to Vimeo first then uploading from there into TravellersPoint video gallery is a significant time-user particularly when you're on the road. I seem to remember with TravelPod you just uploaded videos directly from your device. (As it happens all my old saved videos from TravelPod are in .flv format so first I have to run a .mov converter on each one). However I can understand the huge storage requirement TravellersPoint would encounter if we could upload direct to the gallery.

Is there no alternative. Could I not for example keep all my videos in an iCloud Drive file [99 cents per month for 50GB] and access them from there for upload? Or create a website just for me and my videos? Or couldn't TravellersPoint set up a video storage facility that we can pay a reasonable sub to access? I don't want to go YouTube.

I guess the answer is to just forget about videos - looking through old System Talk forum posts that seems to be the consensus.

Thanks for any ideas, anyone,
DonSimon

P.S. suggestion: might there not be a topic search facility within System Talk, I have to wade through all those pages manually looking for my subject

What’s wrong with YouTube?

Yes, it's the storage and processing requirement that has put me off hosting videos. We previously partnered with some other service, but when they went belly up, it left us with a problem because all the videos were encoded in some proprietary format that was hard to implement. At that stage it was just far easier to point people to the large video hosting providers.

Speaking of which, aside from Youtube and Vimeo, there is the option to use Flickr as well. Not sure if that is viable for you?

I do think it's a bit of a hole in the feature set on Travellerspoint to not have our own video hosting, particularly considering how popular videos are these days.

I will consider the possibility. If anyone else is keen on Travellerspoint hosting videos, please feel free to chime in here so I have a good gauge on the demand.

DonSimon chimes - and extends his thanks Peter.

Yep, I asked Apple whether it's possible to link to/access items stored on their iCloud but sadly not.

I don't know enough about it but generally-speaking I imagine some site has to host the videos and then I can insert a link in TravellersPoint's edit page to each video. Or maybe I can make my own site. As long as it's reasonable price-wise that would work.

Thanks for the Flickr tip and I had a look but that's $100 per annum and for someone like me with just a few videos that won't change for months/years at a time that's more of an outlay than I am comfortable with.

Perhaps some computer guru here could comment. If there is such a method then if anyone wants to share the storage cost then we could jointly make use of the facility...if such exists!
DonSimon

Yes, you can host a file anywhere and link to it. I think most people would expect to have the video play in a player directly in the blog entry though. Clicking through to a link elsewhere is very much non-optimal.

I am curious why Youtube is not a viable option for you? That's definitely what most people choose to do. It takes care of the uploading, compressing, storage and the player itself as well. You can opt to keep the video private on Youtube if you like so the only way people would see it is directly through your blog.