Features

A recent newcomer is Microsoft Silverlight Streaming (silverlight.live.com). Silverlight is a .NET-based platform for rich internet applications, including interactivity and video streaming. Microsoft's associated video-streaming service currently provides 4GB of free hosting, with streaming up to 700Kbit/s. After the beta phase, it will offer one million minutes at 700Kbit/s per website per month, or an unlimited amount with advertising. For a currently unspecified fee, unlimited streaming will be available without advertising.

You use your Windows Live! login - also your MSN login - to create a Silverlight Streaming account, which returns an ID and key. However, unlike the sites we've focused on so far, Silverlight is an application-hosting service rather than a community-based video-sharing website. You will need to develop your own video front end - that is, you'll have to use your programming skills to create an interface for your video file.

Alternatively, you can use Roxio Buzz to create the appropriate JavaScript. Your viewers will need the Silverlight plug-in to enable in-browser video, which is currently on the release candidate of version 1. This is a quick automatic download and is available for Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2 and Safari.

For the ultimate in customisation options, you could host your video on your own web server. The easiest format to use here is Flash video. You will need a Flash encoder, such

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as Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash (www.sothinkmedia.com/flash-video-encoder), to create your files. This also generates the necessary SWF player and HTML for your webpages. A 30-day trial is available, after which the software costs $45 (around £22).

Before deciding to host your own videos, you should consider carefully the immense bandwidth requirements of video, even at low resolution. Imagine your video is just 30MB in size, and perhaps five minutes long. If you're lucky enough to have hundreds of viewers at once, your web server will be churning out tens of megabytes a minute, the kind of usage most ISPs charge a lot for. In other words, this option is worth considering only if you have serious commercial intentions for your video, and deep pockets. Otherwise, you're better off sticking with the ready-made services described earlier.

Promotion candidates

Getting your video online successfully is only part of the battle. You can forward the link to friends and family, but you probably want to show off your pride and joy to as wide an audience as possible. YouTube has an important tool for this built in: the Tags line in the Video info section. Providing a catchy title and appropriate description will help build interest in your video once viewers have found it, but you need to get them there in the first place.

This is where a sensible choice of Tags comes in. These are the keywords that YouTube's search engine uses, so putting the right words in here can significantly improve your chances of being noticed. Choose words that sum up the content of your video. For example, if the footage focuses on a car show you recently attended, list the models of cars featured, along with a few synonyms for 'car', plus the location and any other relevant terms you can think of. Your video should then appear in the list of matches for a variety of different search criteria, and hopefully more people will watch it as a result.