Sunday, August 9, 2009

video hosting business models

I used screencast.com to upload my latest video presentation. Mainly I used this because I did not have my access to Amazon S3 setup yet and it was hooked directly into my Camtasia V4 platform I used to record the video.

Apparently the guy who I worked with on the video is fairly popular on the Mma newsgroup. So one night last week I announced it on a newsgroup he frequents with a URL to screencast.com.

So early the next morning I get a notice from screencast saying that my free account is about to be shut off because I have used up 75% of my 2GB data transfer allowance on my free account. This did not make sense because I know the video compressed down to only about 50 MB.

But maybe the people on that group wanted to see it. So I purchased the $9.95/month pro account from screen cast. This gives 25GB of storage and 200GB of data transfer each month.

Then I downloaded and installed FireFox (no! :-) because it has a Amazon S3 plug-in. And I practiced uploading and downloading from there. My plan was to move all my stuff over to S3 (at the end of the month) because it is way cheaper, right? Uhhh?

I tell lots of people to use Amazon's S3 service because it is only pennies per GB of storage and transfer rate. I looked out there this week and it was $0.17/GB to tranfer data from their server. That's way less than screencast, right?

But if you figure it out, 200GB for $10/month is actually only $0.05 per GB!

So if you look at the break even point, around 50GB tranfering out of Amazon is about the same as screencast charges. The next 150GB is cheaper on screencast!

So even though many people with Macs have had trouble seeing the video, lots of people have downloaded it and I have transferred more more than 2.5GB (+1.5GB on the free account) out of screencast so far. At 50MB per viewing, that could be 75 viewings, probably isn't...just me testing 50+ times! :-)

Finally, if I make a video (or a set) that will be viewed sufficiently many times to transfer more than 50GB of data, screencast.com would be the way to go.

Regards..

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