Self Hosted Streaming Video

Benefits to Self Hosting Streaming Video

Self hosting of streaming videos is an option when using custom hosting services, or for those who also want to be the system administractor cloud services.

The benefits of self hosting streaming videos include but are not limited to:

  • Branding: Brands may be best served by hosting their own videos on their own site where they have content control and don't have competing brands.
  • Blue Ocean: Youtube wants people to stay on their site and watch lots of videos; it is their business model. Any video or live stream on YouTube will also have choices for the viewer to watch other videos. Not a bad thing, but may be a distraction to other channels that does not suit the content producers needs.
  • Content Control: While youtube provides streaming video they exist to make money from advertisers and their software selects which advertisers. Not all advertisers like all forms of videos which are of interest to others.
    • News and current events: Although provided by the news channels on youtube may be deemed as inapprioate by Youtube even though they are tamer than what exists on youtube via the network feeds.
    • Political or videos that effect the public opinion: Many advertisers may want to aviod topics that are political or they hold different political or public opinions.
    • Bogus copyright claimes: There exists those who are so passionate about a topic that they will attempt to have YouTube remove the content they don't like by flagging it as a copyright violation even though the content is the opinion of one person and no content other than that person stating his opinion is in the video. Such claims can prevent the content creator from using their channel for a period of time.
  • Distribution Control: When you use a service such as YouTube you also agree to the terms that they can distribute it as they like. This includes placing ads on it and agreeing to their terms of service for usage on other sites.
For these reasons and others ... many have choosen to live stream from their own sites. These include: Brands who provide marketing materials and don't want competitors advertising on their materials; Geopolitical content providers who cover Geopolitical areas such as US and China or Isreal and Gaza; Gaming content providers who may stream games that are not rated as PG. Religous content providers who others may find as contraversal or they don't want materials advertised on their content they find contraversal.

Self Hosting Options

LAMP hosting provides Apache, MySQL, and PHP running on a Linux system. But Apache does not have streaming video although it can host video files; And PHP is not really setup to have ports for video streaming held open to provide streaming services: Another service needs to be used in addition to the LAMP. Many types of servers run on Linux, Windows, Or Apple, but these need to be installed from the command shell access to the server.