Web video is exploding like crazy and I'll do my best to keep you up with what's happening, and how you can use online video for your own needs.

We're a video company, right? So the brain trust got together and realized that our previous sites lacked videos in prominent spots - not a good idea when trying to sell them. Thats why with the recent redesign of bigteeth.tv we made sure that you would be able to see lots of videos - and with ease. Knowing how important the video samples were, we thought long and hard about the best way to host 'em and post 'em based on the following criteria:

1. Do you upload and host the video yourself, or host it on the web and embed it?
2. Will it take up lots of bandwidth and server space?
3. Will the video player integrate with the design of your site?
4. Can you track the number of plays that your video gets?

Using the above as a guide, we decided to host our videos on the video hosting site http://www.viddler.com. Viddler is similar to YouTube mainly in that its a place where you house the videos separate from your own site. This frees up space for other files and pages and takes away a lot of the hassle of worrying if people can view your videos in Quicktime or Windows Media or Flash. Unlike YouTube, Viddler allows much more control over how your videos on the web are seen. How so?

- Customizable Player - You can design your video player to be branded with your colors, and even add a watermark of your logo to the bottom of every video.

Here's an example of extremely popular web show Wine Library TV's viddler player.

- Easily embeddable - This is true not only of Viddler. Most video hosting sites you've heard of (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) will do this. Viddler lets you choose your video size and type of player and then you just copy and paste the code into your page.

 
-  SEO Friendly - Viddler videos allow you to upload your own thumbnail so you can choose what people see before they click. Also, you can enter tags and descriptions that if chosen wisely will bring the right audiences to your site (This is also true of YouTube and the others).
- Analytics Friendly - Viddler has its own tracking but is also tied in very well with Tubemogul, a video distribution and tracking site (more on this one in a later post). With viddler and Tubemogul you can see how many people are watching your video, and even for how long - you'll know if that 12 minute video is only getting 16 seconds of play it might be time to edit.

There are many other cool things you can do with Viddler that involve tagging and commenting in specific places of the video, but for our purposes we just want to be able to play them for you.

I hope you find this helpful if you're looking to put videos on your own page or blog and if you want to dig further by all means give me a shout and I can dispense more of my homespun good ol' fashioned web video wisdom. Also, if you use Viddler or another hosting site, or host your own videos, we'd love to hear how and why you came to that decision.