Having created and exported your screencast now you’ll want to host it somewhere so you can show it to your visitors.  The two main options are to host it externally or internally.  You are in episode 6 of 9 in this screencast tutorial series.

We’ll discuss external hosting with sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Screencast.com in the next episode.  Here we’ll discuss internal hosting – i.e. hosting the video on your own sites.

These are your obvious internal hosting options:

• FTP in your site
• FTP on a separate site
• Amazon S3
• Content Delivery Network

Inside ShowMeDo (co-founded in 2005) we serve 1TB of data (around 60,000 screencasts) a month using commodity FTP hosting.  Initially we used GoDaddy’s premium accounts and now we use a machine at WebFaction.  Generally speaking commodity hosting is cheap as chips and serves screencasts faster than they can be viewed which is what you want.

If you use your own site’s FTP allocation to serve your screencast then there’s a possibility that you’ll run out of bandwidth if you have a lean account (yes, they still exist).  If that’s the case spend some extra cash and get yourself a separate FTP host, WebFaction do a fine job.

Amazon’s S3 is pretty good, we’ve been experimenting with it.  S3 is a part of Amazon Web Services.  It doesn’t always serve screencasts fast enough but they do offer a Content Delivery Network (focusing on the US and Europe) which is bound to improve.  I have seen other companies use S3 and the results have been pretty decent.  The nice thing with S3 is you only pay for the bandwidth that’s been used.

Finally you could use a CDN like Akamai.  Typically these are expensive and only useful if you’re serving many copies of your screencast every day.  At a rough guess I’d suggest not worrying about a CDN until you’re serving over 2,000 views each day or if you have a strong viewerbase in a different country to your FTP host.

When looking to host the screencast in your site you have a choice of two main players – the long-standing JW FLV Media Player and the newer FlowPlayer.

Inside ProCasts we use the JW player (see our screencast examples), it is very well-supported, supports statistics and Google Analytics, skinning and plugins (e.g. for subtitles).  For non-commercial use it is free, for commercial use the license is very cheap (30Euros).

FlowPlayer is used by many and has growing acceptance, our client LiveDrive use it on their Demos page.  It appears to support Google Analytics but doesn’t seem to support custom event tracking.

Next – getting more exposure using sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Screencast.com.

Do you want more of your visitors to use your software? We make professional screencasts.  Get in Contact and we’ll help you convert more visitors into users, sell more of your software and reduce your support costs.

Become a better screencaster – read The Screencasting Handbook.  We’re distilling 4 years of experience into our book, this blog series you’re reading was the first inspiration that we should write everything we know into a book to make you a better screencaster.

The Screencast Tutorial Part 6 – Embedding your screencast in your site by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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