Hosting Big Ol' Videos

TychoCelchuuu

I make Company of Heroes vidcasts, which is going to mean nothing to 99.9% of you, but basically I end up with videos ranging from 200 to 500 MB that I want to be able to show to a lot of people. Up until now some nice dude has provided me with an FTP that I just uploaded everything to, but apparently I'm too popular or something and I broke it, so I'm out on the street again. Most other people use Filefront to host the videos, which works pretty well except their upload interface sucks and the speed at which I upload is horrific.

So basically, my needs are "let people download 200 to 500 MB videos at a speed that won't make them cry." Free is almost certainly a requirement, although if it's really cheap I might consider it. Filefront right now is the forerunner; what I'm asking is if any of you know any better options.

I'm not 100% sure about bandwidth needs or anything but I think on average it was about 2000 downloads each month or something in that ballpark.

VThornheart

Could you make them available as a Torrent? That would allow for a quick ramp-up of overall download speed as more people got it.

matt has a problem

Is uploading it to torrent sites and seeding it out of the question?

:edit: Damn you V.

TychoCelchuuu

I guess I should add that there are about 40 videos right now and there are only going to be more as time goes on so I don't think it's feasible to have them all seeded as torrents. If I'm wrong though let me know and I could think about that.

Also if they could be streamed that would be really cool. Filefront sort of lets people do that so that's good.

VThornheart

lol matthas

Hmm... Tycho, once you've seeded it to the world (and enough people have it) theoretically you don't need to remain seeding it: you could just seed the most recent one, and leave acquisition of earlier ones up to prior owners. In theory.

In practice, if not too many people are downloading it (or they're not the sort to remain seeding it), indeed you'll have to find a different solution... but the solutions available at that point are mostly counterproductive, because if you don't have a lot of viewers the kinds of hosting plans you might need to host such large files could possibly get expensive. =(

Everywhereasign

But if you make them available by torrent, and you have all the old ones hosted by some place like Filefront, you'll be keeping your fans happy. When a new one comes out they're going to get lightening fast speeds, but old ones will have to be a little more patient.

I have no idea what kind of audience you have and how often they pick up your old stuff. But if it's mainly people looking for the latest vidcast a dual solution with a torrent is ideal.

Revision3 does the same sort of thing. Of course they have the cash to host their own local vids, you'll have to use filefront.

matt has a problem

There are also sites like Megaupload too, I think the largest files you can put up there are 1 gig.

khain

The problem with torrents is that you have to be able to seed the first copy yourself and given that I assume Tycho has a residential connection his upload speed isn't going to be very good.

Monolithic_Dome

Why not vimeo? http://www.vimeo.com/help/basics

or blip? http://blip.tv/

our youtube? http://www.youtube.com/

Or any other of the thousands of video-sharing sites out there?

TychoCelchuuu

Monolithic_Dome wrote: »

Why not vimeo? http://www.vimeo.com/help/basics

or blip? http://blip.tv/

our youtube? http://www.youtube.com/

Or any other of the thousands of video-sharing sites out there?

None of 'em preserve the quality/let me upload something that large or long/some combination of those things. At least none that I've seen.