Teachers, marketers and communications professionals often share videos with their network or audience. From promotional videos to conference recordings, educational videos and tutorials. For many, YouTube is the most obvious option. It’s easy, cheap and everyone knows it. But of course, using YouTube to host your videos comes with major problems. So this week: alternatives to YouTube during Digital Independence Day.
So what are the downsides of YouTube? First of all: YouTube collects data on your audience’s behaviour. If you send a link to the children in your class or the people in your network, you’re forcing them to hand over their data to YouTube. And that’s before we even get to the persistent algorithms, which are used, among other things, to suggest what to watch next once the video ends. Before you know it, they’ve fallen down some rabbit hole. It all makes sense once you look into YouTube’s business model: get people to spend as much time on YouTube as possible, and sell as many ads as possible. A model that, as we now know, encourages nasty, addictive and opaque practices.
Fortunately, none of this is necessary, and there are plenty of options for making your video accessible without Big Tech and data guzzlers.
Video hosting
Before we discuss a few options, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what video hosting actually is, and why you need a dedicated service or platform for it. Can’t you just upload your video file through your website’s CMS?
Yes, sometimes you can. In WordPress, you can simply upload an mp4, and in most cases it will play on the page where you place it. Or you can use Hyper8 to generate a simple video site. So why a dedicated platform? Videos you want to publish online are often very large files. You need a place with enough storage to keep those files for a longer period of time. And if your video gets a lot of views, you also have to take the available bandwidth into account. The more people want to watch the video at the same time, the more bandwidth needs to be available.
To save bandwidth (both as a video provider and as a viewer), it’s sometimes wise to optimise videos for different uses. By transcoding a video smartly, you can make sure people on their phones get a smaller (lighter) version of a video than people watching in the highest quality on their laptops. Transcoding, which video platforms often take care of, ensures that videos reach viewers in the best possible way, regardless of the device they use.
Some video platforms also offer interesting statistics. These let you measure whether people actually watch your videos all the way through, or tell you something about their reach.
Almost all video tools on the internet use the open source tool FFmpeg to edit and manipulate video files. FFmpeg is seen as one of the foundations of today’s internet. Major platforms like Netflix and YouTube use it too. Yet it runs mainly on volunteers. Getting started with open source video? Consider making a donation.
The local option
If you want to put ad-free and tracker-free videos on your website, in most cases that unfortunately won’t be free. Hosting videos simply costs money. Storing (often large) video files and providing the bandwidth needed for sometimes tens of thousands of viewers has to be paid for somehow when there’s no advertising revenue, as there is with YouTube.
Looking for a video host based in Europe? Then take a look at, for example, European Alternatives’ overview of video hosting services. There you’ll find the Dutch Mave.io and JetStream, among others, both of which present themselves as European, privacy-friendly and sovereign. Slovenian BunnyCDN, also on the list, has special settings to protect viewers’ privacy and to make sure data is only sent via European servers. German Alugha, in turn, focuses specifically on making video accessible in multiple languages using automatic subtitles and AI dubbing.
A paid video service is a good alternative if you want more control over the data collected and don’t want too much technical hassle. They take care of managing storage, transcoding and providing enough bandwidth. But we wouldn’t be PublicSpaces if we didn’t add a critical note here. Because even though the providers above have their customers’ best interests at heart, it can sometimes be quite difficult to switch, or to move your videos to another provider. And it’s often not possible to look under the hood to see what really happens to all that data.
The autonomous option
But don’t despair! Fortunately, there are also solutions you can use to host videos yourself.
Your own domain name
If you want to keep video hosting in your own hands, it’s wise to use your own domain name for it. That has a few major advantages. First of all, a video on your own domain name conveys authenticity. People who see the link know: this video really comes from this organisation. Your own domain name also gives you a lot of freedom should you want to switch to a different system in the future. Links to videos usually change when you move from one system to another. If you manage your own domain name, in many cases you can set up neat redirects, so that links and videos embedded on external web pages simply keep working.
Kaltura CE
For larger organisations that work with video a lot, the German Kaltura offers a professional, open source video management platform. With Kaltura’s software, you can not only upload and publish videos, but also edit them in various ways and create playlists or collections, and you can adapt the player to your house style.
With its advanced user management, extensive statistics and the option to use your own metadata models, Kaltura is suited to larger organisations that want to roll out a video platform across the whole organisation.
Kaltura comes in different editions. There’s a commercial version and a Community Edition that you can host yourself. Unlike the commercial version, the community version has no public video portal where all videos are easy to find. You can, however, embed the videos you upload to Kaltura in your own website or, for example, a virtual learning environment.
MediaCMS
For smaller organisations or departments, Kaltura might be a bit overwhelming, and MediaCMS could be an interesting option for them. Open source MediaCMS is a much lighter application that you can install on your own server, or you can have it managed by its maker.
With MediaCMS, you can build your own video site. You can also embed the videos in your own publications. The MediaCMS software automatically converts uploaded videos into the most commonly used formats, so they work well on all kinds of devices.
Opencast
Opencast is another open source video management system, with its roots in the Swiss academic world. Besides hosting, it also lets you schedule recordings, of lectures or other public sessions, for example. A built-in video editor allows for basic edits. Opencast has a modest, active community of developers and organisations offering services such as hosting for Opencast.
ESUP-Pod
ESUP-Pod is a project that started more than ten years ago at the University of Lille and is actively supported by the French Ministry of Education. More than 50 educational and cultural institutions, mostly in France, currently use it.
Besides transcoding, it offers features for multilingual content, authentication and chapter divisions. Given its academic background, these are features that come in especially handy for knowledge sharing and education. Unfortunately, we haven’t found any commercial providers that support this software yet, so it’s one for handy self-hosters or professional system administrators.
The collective option
Some organisations think nothing of hosting and managing software themselves, but for others it can be a real hurdle to get started. So are there practical platforms where you can join forces?
PeerTube
Anyone looking for open source video platforms will soon come across PeerTube. PeerTube is based on software developed by the French non-profit Framasoft. Unlike the applications above, which let you set up your OWN video server, PeerTube focuses on building video communities, or commons.
Several PublicSpaces partners run their own PeerTube server. Feel free to take a look at our own PeerTube server, or those of Beeld & Geluid, Waag Futurelab and SURF.
On a PeerTube server, you can create different accounts, and each account can manage multiple video channels. Videos you upload to a PeerTube server are neatly converted into different formats and, if you like, even automatically subtitled. In that respect, it’s a little bit like platforms such as YouTube.
But PeerTube also differs from YouTube and the video management systems mentioned earlier in a few important ways.
PeerTube is part of the Fediverse! Because PeerTube uses the ActivityPub protocol, individual PeerTube servers don’t stand on their own. If you have an account on one PeerTube server, you can also ‘follow’ channels on other servers. Or you can follow a PeerTube channel via Mastodon and get an update in your timeline with every new video. That makes PeerTube not just a solution for hosting videos, but also a platform for building a (loyal) audience.
One of the trickier things you’ll face when maintaining your own video system is bandwidth. If a video gets a lot of views, that takes a lot of bandwidth. And if lots of visitors come to watch your videos at the same time, the video may become less accessible and start ‘buffering’ because there isn’t enough bandwidth available. PeerTube has a really neat solution for this. The Peer in PeerTube also stands for peer-to-peer: a system in which viewers share their bandwidth with each other to keep the video accessible. So even with limited server capacity, you can host videos that are free to go viral.
Note: although sharing bandwidth is a great feature and sounds very social, using it does come at the expense of some of your viewers’ privacy, because viewers’ IP addresses can leak. PeerTube server administrators can therefore choose for themselves whether to use this system.
PublicVideo.nl
Because a PeerTube server can easily host multiple accounts and channels, it’s also a platform that lends itself very well to collectives, who can organise management together and save costs.
The website joinpeertube.org has an overview of servers where organisations or individuals can start a channel and post videos straight away. Each server has its own policy on what kinds of channels it wants to host and the conditions that apply. Some focus on artists and musicians, others on scientists.
PublicSpaces recently launched its own collective PeerTube server, where public organisations and organisations with a social mission can get a channel. Through this initiative, we’re exploring how to set up and maintain a video server together. Can we benefit from shared reach? What are the costs? How do we organise governance? Working together on the first Dutch Video Commons.
So want to get started with PeerTube right away, but don’t have your own server yet? Start your channel on PublicVideo.nl by sending an email to support@publicvideo.nl.
The ‘social’ option
Finally, a few tips for when you want to share a video on the Fediverse without PeerTube. Often, you don’t need a separate video platform for that at all.
Mastodon
You can upload videos directly to Mastodon. They aren’t optimised, so you’ll need to make sure the video isn’t too large yourself. Most servers accept videos up to 99 MB, so that’s fine for short clips or viral videos.
Loops
Prefer sharing vertical videos, like on TikTok and Instagram? Then try dropping them on loops.video. You can also share videos on Loops via the web or chat apps. Videos on Loops don’t stay up forever and are deleted after 30 days. So perhaps not for your archive, but great for a fun campaign video.
To wrap up
There are many different tools for making your videos available online. Which one you choose depends on how much responsibility you can and want to take for hosting and managing a complex environment, or whether you’d rather outsource that.
Unlike YouTube, most of these tools don’t come with built-in reach. You’ll have to generate that yourself through your existing communication channels. So if you’d still rather use commercial platforms with algorithms that give your videos reach, at least also put your videos on a free or independent platform. That way you won’t exclude anyone, and people who prefer to avoid such platforms can still enjoy your videos.
A few disclaimers
Everything is in flux
Companies can always change. What is a foundation today could become a for-profit company later. What is a European provider today could later be bought up by a Chinese company. So always stay alert to the infrastructure behind the tools and services you use. Want real control over your digital infrastructure? Then use our Digitale Spoelkeuken to put your entire infrastructure under the microscope every year.
Tip: with open source products you host yourself, you always sidestep this. What’s in your own hands stays in your own hands.
This wasn’t an exhaustive list of alternatives
There are many more video platforms out there. We’ve given a selection of distinctive providers, each with their own special features. For more alternatives, take a look at Open Alternative, European Alternatives and Open Source Alternative.
