Sites Similar to YouTube

Here’s a short list of websites similar to YouTube that you can use to watch and display your streaming video content. Most of these sites provide code for individual videos to enable you to embed them in your site directly. We have highlighted the major points & USP of each website, wherever possible.

Google Video: Typical Google. Simple and Easy on the eyes. Syndicates videos from a lot of video sharing sites and with power of Google search you can find virtually any video on the planet.

MSN Soapbox: This is one service that I probably don’t have much to talk about. It’s part of the renowned MSN Suite of online applications. Offers all the standard bookmarking, commenting, tagging, rating and sharing features and has it’s own flash-based player.

Dailymotion is another humongous hosting cum sharing service. They have the standard set of features wrapped with a strict set of rules that prohibits any kind of explicit content. If there’s one thing that sets it apart from the crowd – it’s the JukeBox feature. Video-Blogging and direct uploads from webcam supported too.

Metacafe: Metacafe is one of the world’s largest video sites, attracting more than 40 million unique viewers each month. They specialize in short-form original content – from new, emerging talents and established Hollywood heavyweights alike. Since 2003 Metacafe has been one of the top independent online video sites. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York.

video-sharing-sites

Tudou is one of the largest video sharing websites in China, where users can upload, view and share video clips. Tudou went live on April 15, 2005 and by September 2007, served over 55 million videos each day.

Tudou states they are one of the world’s largest bandwidth users, moving more than 1 Petabyte per day to 7 million users. YouTube does serve a larger number of videos per day, but since the average Tudou video is longer in duration, the total amount of minutes of video being streamed daily from Tudou is significantly larger – about 15 billion minutes vs. 3 billion for YouTube.[1]

Tudou is becoming popular with users in the west because it allows the viewer to watch entire episodes of television shows and movies, rather than being restricted to short 10 minute clips as with YouTube.

Vimeo: Another cool video hosting service that has been around since end 2004 and reflects the Web 2.0 genre of web-design. They share helpful pointers with you in case you’re lacking ideas regarding creation of unique video content. In action are a bunch of highly configurable privacy options with which you can create fine-grained access control lists to allow only select group of people to view your videos. In short, you choose who exactly sees which of your videos. Has personalized homepage where you can neatly arrange all of your favorite videos. Allows tagging of videos.

Break.com is the premier online entertainment destination for guys with over 18 million unique viewers and 50 million page impressions per month . Men 18-34 visit Break for the best content online, viewing over 12 million videos and 5 million picture views daily

Multiply is a social networking service with an emphasis on allowing users to share media – such as photos, videos and blog entries – with their “real-world” network. The website was launched in March 2004 and has over 11 million registered users

Users can easily upload videos directly to Multiply, or they can pull video in from YouTube, Photobucket, Google Video, Metacafe, or myspacetv.com. Free users can upload up to 10 minutes (or 100mb of video footage). Premium members have a limit of 20 minutes (or 200mb)

Veoh: Veoh is a revolutionary online video service that gives users the power to easily discover, watch, and personalize their entertainment viewing experience. With a simple broadband connection Veoh gives you free access to all of the great TV and film studio content, independent productions, and user-generated videos on the Web. From hit series on CBS, ABC, MTV Networks to content from Warner Bros., Sony Pictures and ESPN to your favorite YouTube clips, Veoh turns the vast universe of Internet video into an easy-to-use, high-quality, personalized experience that entertainment fans everywhere can enjoy. Veoh’s powerful search capabilities and recommendations engine help you easily find videos that you want to watch as well as discover content you didn’t know existed

Imeem is a free to use social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all digital media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. Launched in October 2004, the service has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of Flickr and YouTube.

Blip.tv promises to bring to you shows – the kind of stuff you might find on television but won’t. Highly rated by PC World and Business 2.0 magazines this site syndicates its content with the likes of AOL Video, Yahoo! Video, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MSN Video, Google Video etc. thus effectively multiplying your reach by millions. If you’ve got what it takes to create a great show, it may even get broadcast on this TV channel that blip.tv owns. And if your show’s a hit, they allow you to pick your own advertisers and earn revenue. Flash, QuickTime, DivX, 3gp – more or less all major formats are supported.

LiveVideo : Channels, Favorites, Subscriptions, Videos, Photos – nothing out of the place that can make this service really stand out. It’s got a good blend of general features including a Hit or Miss rating system. However, it’s probably one of the very few which offer direct recording from webcams (see Viddler )

FLURL allows you to upload and share videos under a set of pre-existing categories. Their rating system consists of a meter that displays the FLURL or HURL rating of a video.Mature content can be found profusely (there’s a separate above 18 section). Mature Filtering options are available but turned off by default for any new visitors.

Revver has a clever mechanism that helps it track and monetize the uploaded videos as they spread virally across the internet – so “no matter where your creativity travels, you benefit”. Your uploaded video is paired with a targeted advertisement and the revenue is split 50/50 with you. Those who share and spread the videos get to keep part of the spoils too. 20% of the ad revenue is handed to them. Of particular interest to the developers is the Revver API, which allows one to build a video-sharing site complete with user accounts, uploading, sharing tools and access to the full Revver library of videos. The bandwidth is covered by Revver and the ad revenue is split three ways – you, Revver and the content creator.

Brightcove lets you build and launch your own internet TV station. You can have your channel up and running within minutes and retain full control over the program schedule. Videos uploaded by other users can be incorporated into your shows too. Your channel is syndicated with other major players on the net and you can earn revenue through advertising as well as video sales. Features a pretty eye-candy interface.

Spike A service by iFILM that has an extensive library of movie clips, music videos, short films, video game trailers, action sports and its popular ‘viral videos’ collection. Since October 2005, it’s a part of the Viacom network – so one can definitely trust this one. Of course you can expect all the latest and hottest of the videos here and can upload your own too. Has clips of daily TV shows from around the world.

Viddler A site with simplistic but likable Web 2.0 style interface that allows you to upload, enhance and share your digital videos. Similar to VideoEgg, they offer a mechanism through which you can directly record / upload your videos using your webcam without requiring the use of any third-party recording tool.Viddler employs a mechanism which searches for content inside the videos, thus making your uploads search results relevant. Has their own flash-based player.

AtomUploads : A video uploading and sharing service by AtomFilms – which is a division of the MTV Networks. As a result you can find a lot of unique web-shows hosted at this site. Not much information is available about their hosting features. However, as a MTV service you can expect the standards to be quite high. Features channel based organization and member groups / communities. Crackle (formerly known as Grouper) is a Sony Pictures Entertainment company. It acts as a streaming entertainment network dedicated to the discovery and development of pioneering video creators across a diverse range of genres.

Crackle supports multi-platform syndication to Sony devices, IPTV and major social networking sites. Crackle is all about “launching tomorrow’s stars today” and can serve as a serious platform for aspiring directors. There are contests going on all the time to hand-pick the most innovative creators and launch them in collaboration with Sony Pictures and other leading media partners.

Kewego This is a German service and the interface language is Deutsch. However, the registration process and controls are pretty similar to any of the common video hosts – so you shouldn’t find it too difficult to make your way around this one, even if you don’t know the language. Incidentally, there is a small link right at the bottom of the page that allows you to switch to the English version. Keep in mind though – majority of the audience is German.

Stage6 A video hosting service by DivX for people who love videos. DivX, if you remember, is the group which came up with a similarly named format of video encoding for online distribution. DivX videos can be of pretty high quality and are rendered through a custom player which is available as a plug-in for most famous browsers. According to the Stage6 team, “Anyone can become a publisher, anyone can build an audience and every video available on Stage6 is compatible with over 70 million consumer electronics devices from every major manufacturer, making it easy to play back Stage6 videos on your television or portable device.

vidiLife A basic video uploading and sharing site. Has the look & feel of YouTube in it’s teething stages. What’s with the outdated template design and grainy logos? Simplicity is good but eye-candy is the order of the day and in order to survive the web-age, you gotta indulge in it as quick as possible. Has a video rating system (on a scale of 10) that shows badges about the size of the Digg badges beside each video. Sports some pre-categorised sections like Funny, Music, Stupid, Amateur, Crazy etc. Photo uploads permitted too. Claims to allow unlimited uploads.

Zoopy proudly presents itself as South Africa’s first video and photo sharing social network. It’s a pretty basic service with an easy-going note that can be spotted all over the site. There’s a standing challenge that attempts to coax the hidden director in you to come out into the limelight.

uVouch Another site that offers all the standard features – video sharing & organisation, social networking, discussion groups, playlists, customisable profiles etc. There’s rating system in place with which you can vouch for other’s content. Allow for direct importing of videos from other hosting sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Grouper, Myspace etc. Has a couple of widgets & gadgets for your site / blog.

ClipShack is a community for videophiles – a place for sharing your videos with the world. Its run by Reality Digital, Inc. – a company with years of experience in catering to the multimedia needs of the corporate sector. Pretty basic interface.

Selfcast TV A basic hosting service with standard features and channel-based organisation. Allows Mature content and has a SafeSearch filter in place. One upper it has compared to other services is that it allows for direct mobile based uploads through MMS (currently in UK & Europe only).

Flukiest is an interactive community for sharing and managing digital media by artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, directors, producers, and technologists – which in other words mean it’s a photo and video hosting service. There seems to be a tagging engine at large judging from the humongous tag-cloud you encounter on the front page. Other services include email, buddy list, forums, blog and a separate music video section. Zeec is another German video hosting service that you won’t find so difficult to navigate around. This one too allows you to directly record / update videos off your webcam. The interface follows the Web 2.0 ideal and has a vague resemblance to the Last.FM music cum social networking site.

Myubo comes in four linguistic flavours – Czech, Deutsch, English and Slovak. It sports a mechanism to upload, view and share live and pre-recorded video via mobile 2.5G and 3G networks such as GPRS, EDGE, CDMA or UMTS, web and fixed IP networks. Pretty much covers the whole consumer wireless spectrum. Among offered features are channel based organisation, Mobile TV and user communities