As Online Learning and Content Publishers Video is your primary and, in some cases, even the only way you utilize your website or communicate and educate with your viewers.
In order to provide the best service and solution for your viewers, you need a Hosting Platform that provides you a solution and not only a tool.
We collect the top 6 alternative Companies for Video Hosting that have been chosen and trusted by many businesses worldwide. Each one provides a solution that includes features and tools that define the solution for your Online Learning or Content Publishers website.
The Alternatives Video Hosting Platform will focus on the main features for Online Education -Courses and Content Publishers. From Security and encryption capabilities, through the way to embed your content on your site, via the features to steam your content and utilize it, and to the most important- Analyses and Monitor- what each of those Video Hosting Companies will provide you to learn about your audience, what they watch, when, and what is the heatmap of the Video.
A clear and unbiased review of these platforms and an exhaustive comparison of their features, pros, and cons, which will guide you to make a better decision with your video hosting needs for Online Education and Content Publishers –
We present to you a clear and unbiased review of these platforms and an exhaustive comparison among their features, pros, and cons, which will guide you to make a better decision with your video hosting needs.
01. EMBEDDING
Find out how some of the most popular video hosting platforms stack up when it comes to video embeds.
Embedding functionality is a critical feature that every legitimate video hosting provider offers users.
The concept is simple. Instead of uploading your video directly onto your website, you embed a link to your video, hosted somewhere else. That host makes the video available to your website visitors, which offers you and your users a few key advantages.
Compared to direct uploads, embedded videos are:
- Better optimized for online viewing.
- Easier to integrate with advanced features like closed-captioning.
- Much faster and lighter, significantly reducing page load times.
The list goes on. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a digital marketer or internet video expert who doesn’t recommend embedding videos. It just makes more sense than uploading your video files directly onto your website.
But in order to embed a video, you must first select a video host. This is the company that will host your video and make a player available on your website.
Not all video hosting platforms are equal. Choosing the right video host will impact your ability to embed videos and the features your users can enjoy while consuming your content.
Comparison
Let’s take a look at five of the most reputable and popular video hosting services around right now:
1. Brightcove 
Brightcove’s large-scale B2B video platform emphasizes security and reliability. It’s designed for enterprise marketers, and doesn’t publish its prices online – you have to contact them and ask for a quote.
Since Brightcove primarily addresses the enterprise market, it expects its users to have some technical expertise. It offers a variety of embed codes suited for different purposes, and allows users to modify its codes to create customized embedded players.
It does offer a standard default embed code ideal for most situations, and an iframe embed code designed to minimize unwanted interactions with on-site JavaScript and CSS. It also offers users advanced in-page embedding capabilities.
2. Dacast
Dacast is an on-demand media platform that helps small and mid-sized businesses broadcast content to their audiences. The company offers comprehensive support to its users, who typically include faith, sports, and entertainment media companies.
Dacast offers multiple embed codes for embedding videos and live streams on websites, but most users will use its JavaScript embed feature. The process is simple and easy to use, but users have reported problems with refreshing embed links after changing their content.
Fortunately, Dacast’s customer service team is responsive and genuinely helpful. But most users will only discover that fact after some initial frustration or technical difficulty.
3. Wistia
Wistia is a business-oriented video host that prides itself on integration and customer service. The video platform is popular among small and mid-sized businesses investing in video marketing.
Wistia allows users to generate embed codes for any media they upload to its servers. It offers a standard embed script, a resilient iframe-based “fallback” script, and a popover embed script. Pop-overs actually start playing media on top of your website content.
Wistia explains most of its embedding features in plain, simple English designed to help newcomers familiarize themselves with video embedding technologies. The company also features a developer-friendly JavaScript API that enables further customization.
4. Kaltura
Kaltura is a video hosting provider and live stream service widely used by academic and healthcare institutions. Using Kaltura can be somewhat unwieldy and overly technical, but this is to be expected considering its target audience.
Kaltura requires users to configure their content for sharing before they can embed it anywhere. It generates embed codes directly under the Share menu attached to each media file in its users’ libraries.
Beyond changing the size of the player and editing the video’s start and stop time, Kaltura makes little in the way of customization available to users. In order to get more out of Kaltura, users must use one of its third-party extensions through Microsoft, Caliper, or a variety of other partnerships.
5. Vimeo
Vimeo is a popular video hosting service that offers users a Basic subscription for free. While its free video hosting service is limited, it is nonetheless a popular choice for students, marketers, and content creators of all kinds.
Vimeo’s Basic members can embed its standard player onto any website. Users can customize the standard player’s size, color, and video title, but not much else.
Plus, PRO, Business, and Premium users enjoy a far greater degree of freedom and customization when it comes to video embed codes. They can show or hide player elements like the “Share”, “Like”, and “Watch Later” buttons, and even hide Vimeo’s branding and logo from the player. Advanced features are only available to Vimeo’s highest-paying customers.
6. Cincopa
Cincopa is a video hosting platform that offers full-scale viewer analytics to content creators. It offers robust visibility into viewers’ actions and behaviors, making it an ideal tool for marketers, enterprise content creators, and video professionals of all kinds.
Cincopa offers users two ways to get embed codes for their uploaded videos.
- The quick, simple Cincopa wizard produces an embed code as the last step of the guided uploading process. This is ideal for newcomers and non-technical users.
- The Galleries page includes an embed link for every media file listed. This makes it easy for users to organize and host dynamic galleries on their websites.
Cincopa offers a wealth of embed options to its users. The standard HTML embed code is compatible with any website. Users may also choose a WordPress-specific embed code or a special embed code for emails and newsletters. Cincopa is compatible with most CMS systems, including Drupal, Blogger, Joomla, Office 365, Tumblr, and more.
Ratings For Embedding
02. VIDEO SECURITY
Brands and content creators are paying more attention to security than ever.
Data privacy regulations are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. Cybercriminals continue to deploy complex automated tools to capture unsecured user data and compromise accounts.
New cybercrime tools can even target video content.
Video hosting security has never been more important. Organizations that host their video content on secure servers are better able to protect their users. Security technologies like two-step authentication and role-based permissions are crucial to making this happen.
Secure video hosting uses technologies like these to keep unauthorized users from accessing video content. The best video hosting platforms take security one step further and make best-in-class security features intuitive and easy-to-use.
There is often a tradeoff between security and convenience. Some security technologies offer robust protection at the cost of user-friendliness. Finding the right video hosting solution for your needs means identifying the ideal balance between video security and the user experience.
Comparison
Every video hosting solution has a unique approach to security and the user experience. Let’s look at how some of the industry’s top video hosting companies deliver secure content to users.
1. Brightcove
Brightcove is a B2B video platform that focuses on enterprise security. Security features like HLS encryption, geo-filtering, and token authentication make it well-suited for content creators who want to keep sensitive information away from prying eyes.
Since Brightcove is enterprise-oriented, its technology is compliant with many of the specific security codes that enterprises look for. Its management dashboard is designed for handling large volumes of video data and role-based permissions for thousands of users at a time.
The main drawback to Brightcove is that its enterprise-ready secure video hosting service is not user-friendly. It is designed for large enterprises with ample access to resources and specialized security talent – not small or mid-sized businesses who can’t afford to build and maintain an on-site security operations center.
2. Dacast
Dacast focuses on small and mid-sized businesses that regularly create and distribute video content to customers. Sports, entertainment, and faith-based organizations are among their customers, and many of these customers want to ensure their content is secured against theft and illicit distribution.
When it comes to protecting its customers’ intellectual properties, Dacast does not perform as well as many of the other entries on this list. The company is trying to keep up with the many strategies that unauthorized users and cybercriminals use to access sensitive content, but have not earned a stellar track record stopping them.
Dacast does offer advanced security services like HLS encryption, but making the most of these features requires professional expertise that small and mid-sized businesses may not have.
3. Wistia
Wistia is a video hosting service that targets growing businesses in a range of industries. They are well-known for decent integration and customer service. Their video security services are somewhat lacking, however.
While Wistia adheres to account protection best practices like SSL and automated server provisioning, it doesn’t do a very good job protecting content creators’ intellectual property rights. Anyone can download protected Wistia videos with relatively little effort. A variety of specialized software tools can do the job.
The company is trying to resolve these problems and host its videos in a more secure way. But it seems like every security update is followed by a new exploit.
4. Kaltura
Kaltura is a technical video hosting provider with a wide range of security, privacy, and compliance features. It is the only video hosting provider that offers a fully-featured on-premises edition – which means users can control every aspect of their video security their own physical server.
If that sounds expensive, that’s because it is. However, Kaltura also allows users to establish flexible security settings through API management. This means that users can configure their video security settings down to a granular level. Features include AES encryption, forensic watermarking, comprehensive digital rights management.
Kaltura’s emphasis on technical security holds a lot of promise. The only disadvantage to its approach is that it requires a significant level of technical expertise to manage effectively. You (or a security professional) will have to configure Kaltura’s security settings to meet your needs – and update your configuration when your needs change.
5. Vimeo
Vimeo gives brands and content administrators several options for securing video. Most of these options are only available to Plus subscribers. Free Vimeo accounts have extremely limited security and are practically free for anyone to download.
Vimeo allows Plus subscribers to send videos securely to one another using a password. Content creators can also specify which websites have permission to embed a video. Despite these options, there are still ways for unauthorized users to download Vimeo videos.
Some Vimeo partners create their own security plugins for use with Vimeo. This is a reasonable thing to do if your enterprise has been using Vimeo for years and cannot easily migrate to another provider. Otherwise, it’s a totally preventable and unnecessary cost.
6. Cincopa
Cincopa offers robust security that doesn’t compromise on the user experience. Content administrators with technical expertise can manually configure the Cincopa API, while non-technical users can simply create and manage role-based permissions for their password-protected galleries.
Cincopa allows administrators to set password protections on a per-gallery basis. You can also create a manual list of media viewers on a .CSV file and securely upload it to the platform. Setting permissions for ten thousand viewers is as easy and straightforward as setting permissions for just one.
Cincopa secures video files against unauthorized downloads by hiding source code from users. An additional layer of code between the user and the video ensures that viewers can’t simply access the video file directly through their browser.
Ratings For Security
03. VIDEO ANALYTICS
Video analytics data are an incredibly valuable source of data for educators and publishers. In these industries, your success relies on people consuming and retaining content. Being able to see user engagement metrics in real-time allows content creators to continuously improve their approach.
Not all video hosting platforms offer video analytics. No two platforms offer the same exact analytics. Educators, publishers, and other content-heavy organizations need to define what capabilities they need most and find a host equipped to meet those needs.
Some examples of analytics capabilities that marketing and sales teams are looking for include:
- Tracking user engagement with branded videos.
- Identifying whether videos successfully target particular demographics.
- Determining where viewers pause, skip, or abandon video content.
- Finding out where video viewers are logging in from.
- Seeing what devices viewers use to view video content.
- Increasing the visibility of your best-performing videos.
All of these are important metrics for determining the overall success of educational and entertainment content. Organizations with video hosting solutions that gather this kind of viewer data can optimize the utility and value of the content they create.
Comparison
Most free video hosting services fail to offer compelling video analytics to content creators. The most popular commercial video hosting platforms offer analytics, but every company makes data available in a different way. Our rating system takes overall data availability as well as the user experience into account when comparing video hosting providers by their analytics features.
1. Brightcove
BrightCove offers an enterprise-level Video Cloud Analytics Platform to its content creators. The purpose-built platform accommodates Big Data analysis and operates at a massive scale. Brightcove’s open API enables developers to create custom analytics from scratch and incorporate them into Brightcove’s system.
Brightcove charges enterprise-level premiums for its enterprise-level technology, so it’s no surprise to see competitors undercutting Brightcove’s pricing. The platform’s developers are mostly addressing the world’s largest corporations, who can afford to pay for a massively scaled analytics engine for their video content.
This also means that Brightcove is meant to work alongside a fully integrated enterprise tech stack. It doesn’t work as a digital asset management (DAM) service that can store and distribute images, audio, and text alongside video – Brightcove assumes its customers already have solutions in place for that.
2. Dacast
Dacast offers video hosting services to small and mid-sized content creators who need fast, easy access to hosting and streaming technology. Video analytics are part of its platform, but they can be difficult to implement effectively.
Like many other video hosting platforms, Dacast does not offer individual insights on users. All of its analytics data concentrates on large-scale viewer trends. Although useful, these trends do not allow content creators to create intelligent audience segments or implement marketing automation using viewer engagement statistics.
Without the ability to establish individual user credentials and track individual users’ content consumption, Dacasts’ video analytics leave marketers and developers with less-than-optimal results. This is especially true for educators who want to track individual users’ progress through course content.
3. Wistia
Wistia collects data on video views and user engagement while enabling content creators to segment audiences by social media platform. This makes it possible to serve slightly different content to your Facebook audience than to your Instagram audience. It also enables valuable customer retargeting initiatives.
Retargeting is the process of sending new content to people who have already completed certain interactions with your content. In Wistia’s case, it focuses on retargeting viewers who have already completed an entire video. It can do this even if the individual user interacts with your content on different social media platforms.
This functionality is somewhat limited by the fact that Wistia doesn’t offer comprehensive, granular information on individual users. It only allows content creators to group users based on a small set of predefined conditions – like people who completed watching an entire video.
4. Kaltura
Kaltura offers a degree of granularity between Brightcove’s and Wistia’s. It gives content creators access to a wide range of filters, ranking algorithms, and viewer-level heatmaps that help identify viewership trends.
These tools are more granular than Wistia’s. It is possible to use Kaltura to make data-driven decisions based on user engagement data. However, the process of doing so can be unwieldy and complicated.
Kaltura’s interface can be difficult to navigate, and its analytics tools are unforgiving in this respect. This is especially true for content creators using various plugins and integrations. Getting Kaltura to process data the way you want it to can be needlessly challenging.
5. Vimeo
While Vimeo is easy to use, its video analytics are among the weakest on this list. It does support geographical distribution, user engagement, and device statistics, but only on a general level. There is no way to take granular, individual user data and use it to inform a bigger strategy.
While you can create and download reports, Vimeo’s viewer statistics are not available as unique points of interoperable data. This makes it hard for content creators to correlate video views with sales, marketing, or any other part of your company’s overall workflow.
Instead of having robust data to work with, content creators have to guess at how video performance maps to Vimeo’s viewership statistics. For Vimeo, detailed user analytics simply are not part of the platform’s main value proposition.
6. Cincopa
Cincopa highlights its state-of-the-art analytics in almost all of its marketing materials and messaging. It makes sense that the company’s analytics engine forms the foundation of its core value. Content creators can track individual viewership and engagement data and create detailed reports containing interoperable data ready for use with third-party solutions.
Cincopa also supports integration with popular marketing and analytics automation tools like HubSpot. This turns video content into a full-scale lead generation and qualification solution. For example, you can automatically enroll viewers who watch an entire video into your HubSpot CRM account and start reaching out to them through email automatically.
Cincopa’s reporting and customization options make it a useful tool for small businesses, mid-market organizations, and large enterprises alike. Educators and publishers that need access to individual viewer data will find significant value in Cincopa’s tools and features.
Ratings For Video Analytics
04. LIVE STREAM
The live streaming format is entirely different from pre-recorded video. Businesses that generate value by live streaming content have unique needs.
For educators and publishers, these needs typically include features like monetization methods, advanced content management, and in-depth analytics. They may also depend on a high-performance content delivery network (CDN) that can guarantee high streaming quality along with state-of-the-art data security and intellectual property protections.
For educators, the ability to record live sessions and securely publish them for students is a must-have. As the industry grows, so too will consumers’ demands. It’s up to the content creator to select a live streaming host that can meet those demands.
Comparison
Educators and publishers rely on live streaming platforms to deliver content to users in real-time. Finding the right live stream hosting solution can be a challenge since each one offers a unique set of tools and features for the purpose. We’ve compared some of the most popular names in live streaming below:
1. Brightcove
Brightcove has supported live stream technology for longer than most of the other names on this list have been in business. As one of the original live video streaming services, it makes sense that Brightcove has a stable, high-value solution in place for helping content creators stream content live.
Brightcove’s live streaming capabilities are particularly well-suited to large enterprises that need scalable, high-impact delivery backed by best-in-class infrastructure. This allows it to broadcast live linear streaming 24 hours a day, like the digital equivalent of a traditional TV station.
The only downside to using Brightcove is its high cost and demanding interface. This is an enterprise application designed for large organizations with plenty of resources and expertise on-hand. Small business broadcasters need not apply.
2. Dacast
Dacast makes live streaming very easy for its customers, who are primarily faith-based organizations and sports content creators. Despite the simplicity of Dacasts’ live streaming technology, it leaves the needs of educators and publishers outside these domains largely unmet.
For example, while Dacast supports live streaming for publishers, achieving multi-channel output for broadcasts can be difficult with the video host’s simplified interface. It is designed primarily for businesses that broadcast content exclusively online – managing over-the-top outputs simultaneously is something that it struggles to handle.
3. Wistia
Wistia is a popular video hosting provider that enables educators and publishers to host and distribute video content on-demand. Unfortunately, Wistia does not support live streaming, so there can be no comparison between it and any of the other popular platforms on this list when it comes to live streaming.
Education and publishing services that rely on Wistia have to add a separate live streaming service to their tech stack. From a user experience standpoint, this complicates the process of creating and hosting video content. Content creators do not want to have to use two separate services in parallel.
4. Kaltura
Kaltura is a popular video hosting service with a large number of customers in the broadcast media and education industries. It makes sense that these customers would look to Kaltura for their live streaming needs, and many do.
Kaltura’s platform offers a few strong advantages when it comes to hosting video-on-demand. Not all of these advantages translate well to the world of live streaming, however. Kaltura has a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver on its live streaming capabilities, and then try to convince unhappy customers to buy new functionalities instead of fixing the ones that are not performing as expected.
To complicate matters, Kaltura’s customer service and customer success teams are not always on the same page when it comes to handling customer feedback. This turns small problems into larger, more expensive ones over time.
5. Vimeo
Vimeo offers live streaming capability alongside its video hosting service. Using Vimeo to live stream is easy to do and requires little technical work. This can make it an attractive option for educators and publishers – at first glance, at least.
Vimeo’s live streaming technology does not support high-resolution streams or high-quality imagery. As a potential customer, you should take time to consider whether this is an important part of your live streaming expectations.
Additionally, Vimeo live streams have a tendency to display incorrectly on some mobile devices. Desktop and laptop users rarely have problems, but users with mobile devices may be unable to fully participate in your live streams. For the price Vimeo charges, users are right to expect better and more robust service.
6. Cincopa
Cincopa allows users to live stream content worldwide through a single dashboard. A full set of third-party integrations enables content creators to broadcast live content to websites, mobile apps, and streaming platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV.
Cincopa’s development team handles the technical process of integrating live-streamed content into online media so that content creators can focus on making great content. The company’s OTT platform is supported by many consumer apps and can broadcast in 4K.
Crucially for educators and publishers, Cincopa automatically records live-streamed events. Content creators immediately have access to their recordings and can analyze them for insights into user engagement right after they finish hosting an event.
Ratings For Live Streaming
05. ON-VIDEO FEATURES
When it comes to the way content is presented, educators and publishers have different needs than many other content creators. Static, non-interactive content presentations cannot fulfill the goals that educators and publishers have.
Instead, they prefer dynamic presentations that encourage viewer interaction. Screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, and customizable presentations can have a powerful impact on viewer engagement.
Not all video hosting platforms support these kinds of on-video features. We’re going to cover some of the most popular options and see how they stack up.
Comparison
1. Brightcove
Brightcove is a full-featured video host that caters to enterprise clients. It offers a wide range of configuration and delivery options and is backed by a large development team.
When it comes to on-video features for educators and publishers, Brightcove delivers, but with a catch. Content creators can distribute highly customized video presentations, but only if they have the skills and expertise necessary to implement those technologies themselves.
Here, Brightcove is relying on its enterprise customers having access to programmers and developers who can use the tools Brightcove provides. The end result is a system that is powerful, but not intuitive or easily manageable.
2. Dacast
Dacast primarily serves small and mid-sized businesses and offers a wealth of features designed to help these organizations maximize the value of their content. It allows viewers to play recorded video at different speeds and easily incorporate multi-language support.
Dacast is good at implementing on-video features designed for small-scale content environments, but it struggles to offer the same performance for larger audiences. This is especially true when it comes to its education and publishing features, which cannot be customized in a scalable way.
As a result, educators and publishers who want to craft customized experiences for individual viewers will be disappointed with Dacast. Even inserting a call-to-action is difficult – Dacast allows them at the end of each video only.
3. Wistia
Wistia is a popular video hosting platform that helps content creators get more out of their brand. It offers a range of useful features, including a limited degree of viewer tracking and analytics. It does support calls-to-action, giving content creators the ability to drive value at key moments.
Educators and publishers will find Wistia’s screen sharing capabilities useful, but will struggle to implement virtual whiteboard technology in a meaningful way. Instead of using a built-in tool for the purpose, content creators have to share their screen and use a third-party app – which means they can’t also show their face at the same time.
For educators and publishers, Wistia struggles to provide value when it comes to multi-language support and chapter customization.
4. Kaltura
Kaltura offers content creators an extensive list of on-video features, including a complete series of accessibility capabilities for colorblind and visually impaired users. Content creators have a degree of flexibility when it comes to on-video features thanks to Kaltura’s HTML role markup capabilities.
Not all of Kaltura’s features are equally robust, however. Users have reported problems integrating these features into their content, with a few complaining about abrupt freezes and unwanted pop-ups getting in the way of content delivery. It’s not clear where these issues come from or if every Kaltura user experiences them.
5. Vimeo
Vimeo requires content creators to incorporate third-party integrations in order to deliver a modern set of on-video features. One example of the kind of third-party service that Vimeo users often turn to is LiveWebinar, which allows content creators to make personalized content and enable video loops, among other useful features.
Integrations are key to just about every successful video hosting platform. But failing to offer best-in-class in-video features natively forces Vimeo customers to undergo additional steps to get what should be standard functionality. This introduces room for error that many educators and publishers won’t appreciate.
6. Cincopa
Cincopa offers a wide range of on-video features, all of which are natively available to all content creators to use the platform. These include monetization features like VAST video ads, to Chromecast integration, and advanced player customization.
Importantly, educator-friendly features like multi-language subtitles do not require additional integrations or manual processes to deploy. The video hosting platform’s extensive list of on-video features are not kept behind premium subscriptions or other obstacles.
Ratings For On-Video Features
VIDEO HOSTING ALTERNATIVES SUMMARY
All the Video Hosting Companies have an excellent video hosting tools and features, which are available for the education and publishers’ business industry.
The ability to efficiently upload and share content for multi-channel distribution is what makes all of these 6 platforms be distinctive from others in the video hosting market.
Standing out of the 6 are Kaltura, BrightCove, and Cincopa which the quality for the features compose a good solution for the online education and Content Publishers Companies.
To have a solution that suits the unique requirements for these types of segments. It’s not the Feature of the Tool but the solution that can cover your needs, to secure your content while being able to embed your content in the right and efficient way, stream and publish the content and by the end of the day analyze your viewers from multiple angles in order to get the most of your Video Content.
Rounding up the ratings below, you can compare the 6 video hosting platforms for the said features and make an assessment of the right platform for your digital content.
