Running your own Youtube Video Sharing site

With all the hoopla surrounding Google's 1.65 Billion, yes with a B I wondered how much it would cost to run my own youtube video sharing website.

So after a few searches I actually came across some websites claiming to have the programming necessary to "run" my own youtube. Prices ranged from $54 up to and beyond $1500 depending on features.

Why the large price spread I wondered. Can't be a thousand dollars worth of extras, surely not. Well it turns out its not just a matter of throwing up a bunch of php commands and connecting it to a database.

The "actual" youtube must have a colossal server network and datacenter. Apparently - who would have thunk - camera suppliers and computer whiz kids never really decided on a "standard" for formats of digital media (movie clips) There are over 25 different codecs all with either their own "we are the best" player or way of displaying movies on a home computer. So the smart guys chose a way to distribute the uploaded movies into ONE playable format that ALL browsers can read - Flash FLV (Flash Live Video)

So when you upload your video in AVI or WMV or MOV or RM or DIVX the youtube smarty system converts it to flash for playback by everyone, without that nasty "install player" message or need to reboot just to play videos.

But, it seems that the server power needed to encode the files from all kinds of different formats such as Windows Media, Real Player, and Quicktime needs a lot of horsepower, processor power to convert, that running this stuff out of your basement is probably not going to work.

After mush research and testing response time from companies to simple and more in depth questions, only one rose WAY above the others. Aptly named www.getyoutube.com is a turnkey one stop programming solution and data center should my idea of windsurfing crashes videos actually takes off.

They answered in under an hour, and have a large data center for housing clients looking for this type of system. The prices, well a little higher than most, but still under budget. You get what you pay for and these guys service is top notch.

So, after I get all my kitesurfing crash videos onto a computer the site will be born and for all to waste their day away watching mindless idiots.

Just the thing for all those home movies and bloopers when you go sporting

Another notch in the belt of societies "must see on internet TV "

Mike McGuinness
Credit
http://www.videospark.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=236