YouTube is closing accounts left right and center

If you have videos on youtube be aware because they are flushing out alot of old accounts which you may have forgotten about but the videos are embeded on your site. This means obviously your videos won’t be seen anymore but also lost. You can’t recover them unless you have the original mpeg4 files on your HD.The flushing out of accounts is because Youtube are doing phone verifications via voice or sms. This is to validate your account so your they can trash old accounts no one else uses. But if your can’t verify your account or have too many accounts under the same phone number you got a big problem like I had.

Youtube is great for exposure because the videos you upload can become viral driving free traffic back to your website but if you use it to host protected videos or video tagged as private watch out. These videos will no longer be avaliable and it’s almost impossible to get your account restored.

You might be thinking you can just upload them again and it’s all sweet. Yes your right but if you don’t have the originals your stuffed. Having the originals safely stored on your HD is a godsend. Now even worse if these videos aree being used in your membership site as content that will show you as account terminated or inactive. This doesn’t look good for paid members when they see this.

Whats the solution YouTube is closing accounts. Only use Youtube as a viral tool to get free traffic. Don’t use it as yoru private video server. Youtube is cracking down on this bigtime. If you have a account with heaps of video that you think are valuable and don’t have backups you can download the video’s off youtube just incase they shut your account down. To do this it’s easy. Use a free tool called “YouTube Downloader” you can get it free from download.com . It’s been downloaded over 94million times and it’s a great tool.

The solution for video content providers that want to host their videos somewhere it is safe and secure and your not at the mercy of Youtube is Amazon S3. This is a paid service but it’s extremely cheap and very reliable. You pay like $3 per Terra byte of streaming media (don’t quote me but it depends on how many videos you have, lenght and the number of times they have been viewed or downloaded. For Amazon S3 info click here.

Why pay when you can get it for free video hosting and  streaming from Youtube?

There are a number of reasons but the main reason is you not having to rely on Youtube to host your videos. If they shut or bloack your account for some strange reason you have lost everything. With Amazon S3 you have ful control of your videos. I want to be clear we are only talking about videos used for content or in a private membership site no one can get access too. You can upload videos to youtube and have them tagged as private so no one can see unless they know the exact url string.

The other reasons are

• Your customers who have paid for a service see Youtube Videos which makes you look cheap
• Your customers can lose focus on the content in the video and hop onto Youtube because of the viral clickable logo in the settings.
• Your customers can skip onto Youtube because Youtube shows related video after it’s finished playing if you don’t specify when embedding.

Amazon S3 elimates all these factors above and gives you credability in the eyes of the customer because you haven’t used a free video provider to host content on that they paid you good money to see. Amazon S3 is super quick and can be hosted in Amazon’s Cloud formation. That means you upload the video to your S3 account whne you enable Amazon CloudFront what happens is your videos are distributed or mirrored ontop many servers geolocated in various locations and will stream from the closest server cluster depending on the views ip address. That’s another reason why you should use your own hosting account. The videos will be too slow to load and most times if you got the lowest hosting plan your fiels will be on a shared server. You want your customers to see your videos fast and this can only happen if you use Amazon S3 mated with the Amazon CloudFront services.