5 Best Video Hosting Sites That You Can Use for Your Business in 2022

Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Live have played a big role in empowering people to become video content creators. Small and medium-sized businesses are no exception in that regard either. While the features offered by different video hosting platforms vary to a great extent, the foundation of all these sites is the same. These platforms play a key role in humanizing your product, engaging your clients, and helping you build brand loyalty.

As you go about planning your video strategy, a video hosting site is the first thing that you will need to consider for your business. After you’ve shot your video, you will need a place where you can upload and store it on the web. From the video hosting platform, you will be able to share it on any other platform.

Modern video hosting sites help you customize the look and feel of your video player, offer marketing options within your videos, and ensure your videos play smoothly across all devices. After testing dozens of video hosting platforms, we came up with the 5 best hosting sites that you can use for your business in 2022.

1. YouTube

YouTube lets you upload videos for free and earn money for your content through ads, views, channel memberships, YouTube premium, etc. With more than 100 million active users per day, YouTube is usually the default choice for business owners looking to host their videos. Since the videos are given prime spots in Google search results, it greatly helps in enhancing your brand visibility.

With YouTube, you are free to add subtitles, cards to highlight your content during the video or the end screen that can promote related content. Most sites on this list would require you to get your videos in front of your target audience but YouTube gives you an already established audience that runs into millions of people. This way, you won’t even be constrained to embed the video elsewhere if you optimize your videos or encourage your fans to get notifications upon adding a new video to your channel.

Another great feature that YouTube offers is that it comes with automatic captions for videos in certain languages. All that you have to do is click Subtitles on the left navigation, and select your published videos. In case, automatic captions for your video are available, you can directly add them to the video, where you can make any changes.

2. Vimeo

Like YouTube, Vimeo also began as a video-sharing platform. It still allows users to post videos and follow their favorite creators while also helping businesses with the customization of video players, collaboration with their team, and accessing analytics and other marketing features.

Vimeo facilitates effortless collaboration; it allows creators to invite team members, clients, freelancers, and other collaborators to preview their projects. Moreover, it comes with different permission levels for different collaborators, which can be later changed based on the project.

Upon sharing your video’s link, reviewers will be able to leave comments even without registering on the platform. The comments would be automatically saved and feature on one side for the video owner’s review, who can respond from any device. You can also use Vimeo Record to capture your screen and communicate your ideas and feedback visually. Also, every previous version of the video would be saved every time a tweaked version of the video is uploaded.

Vimeo Basic is totally free of cost. If you want to go for a premium plan, you can purchase a Pro Plan for $20 that includes version history, approval features, review, and private team projects.

3. Wistia

Wistia comes with a plethora of marketing features that help businesses keep a tab on the video’s progress, collect leads, and generate the best ROI on their content. One of its prime features is the Turnstile email collector, which can help you generate leads.

Also, Wistia’s annotation links can guide your viewers to any site of your choice. These links will appear on the upper-right corner of your video, for as long as you want, without causing any disruption to the viewer’s experience. You can also add a CTA button or a link to another video or web page at the end of the video. And all this is tied down together by the Stats page that allows you to assess the performance of each of your videos at a glance. This page records all the actions of the viewer- from clicking a link to filling a form.

Wistia is free to use for three videos with standard features like a fully customizable player, lead generation tools, video analytics, and unlimited users. If you choose to go for the paid version, you can purchase its Pro plan for $99/month with standard features, ten free videos, and no Wistia branding.

4. SproutVideo

With SproutVideo, you can create basic websites around your video content. You can use these websites to showcase your portfolio, share free video content with your audience, or share tutorials with your team.

SproutVideo lets you choose from six available themes. You can then enter your site name and logo. The Settings tab will let you tweak theme colors, decide the order in which you want to display your videos, select the number of videos to be displayed per page, and choose whether or not the videos should autoplay. Also, you can introduce an About and Contact page to your site along with social sharing buttons.

The videos uploaded by you on your SproutVideo account will appear automatically on your site based on tags. For instance, if you create a “Tutorials” tag, every video with that tag will be added to the site.

One of the best things about videos on SproutVideo is that all of them are login protected, which means visitors will first have to log in to your site to view them. You can password-protect some videos, set them as private, or leave them open to be viewed by everyone. Moreover, SproutVideo allows you to embed videos to an external webpage, where they will be visible to the public regardless of their permission level on SproutVideo.

You can purchase the Sprout plan for $59.99/month that includes video marketing, analytics, video websites, and 125 login-protected viewers.

5. Dacast

Dacast lets you monetize your video content in three different ways ie. through subscriptions (weekly, monthly, or quarterly), pay-per-view (viewers can pay for what they want to watch), and via ads (you can serve ads funded by your advertiser on your content).

Once you’ve uploaded a video on Dacast, go to the Videos tab to click on it and select Paywall from the top navigation. Here, you can customize the pricing for subscriptions and pay-per-view. You can decide how much to choose, how often, and when the payment period starts. You can also generate promo codes and create group pricing, which will give viewers access to multiple videos by paying only once.

You must have an ad network to monetize your videos from ads. You can then go to the Engagement Settings to enable ads and copy and paste the URL of your ad so that it appears in your video. Your customers can pay through PayPal or credit card but will need their own Dacast account to purchase your video content.

You can purchase a Dacast subscription for an annual payment of $39, which will give you 1.2 TB of videos every year. You can also go for the Event plan, which will cost you $63/month and include a paywall and pre-roll advertising features.

Wrapping Up

Which video hosting site is best suited to your business will depend entirely on your business needs. If you seek to make money from your videos, go for a video hosting platform that lets you set up a subscription plan or supports ads. On the other hand, if you merely want to promote your business, try looking for a service that is backed by powerful marketing and analytics tools. What matters the most is that you can get your videos in front of the people whom you want to see your videos.