Video Hosting through Screencast.com owned by TechSmith
Over the last year or so, I have increased the number of videos that I create and publish on the internet. I typically publish these on sites such as Revver, YouTube and Utterz.
However, these free sites all share a common problem. They reduce the size of a video down to about 480 – 360 pixels in width. So if you make a full screen video, they shrink it for you.
That’s nice of them to save you the work, but when someone tries to watch a product demonstration or a video tutorial, they may want to look at the full screen version. If you hit the full screen button with any of those services, the small video they have on file will be stretched across the screen, but it will not retain the detail you originally recorded and uploaded.
To give your visitors, readers, students, colleagues etc, that kind of detail, you need to host the video somewhere and that means paying for bandwidth.
It doesn’t cost much at all to store large files, but enabling people to look at those video files over and over again, requires bandwidth and processor power (on the server). That is something you have to pay for.
TechSmith is a company that makes Camtasia (the leading screen capture program). They setup a relatively cheap video hosting company for just this type of thing called Screencast.com.
Below you can see their rates which are not terribly expensive as these things go.
What is Transfer Bandwidth?
Transfer bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to viewers when they download your content from Screencast.com. You are allotted a certain amount of transfer bandwidth each month depending on the type of account you have purchased.
From within your Screencast.com account, you can view the amount of transfer bandwidth that has already been used. When you reach your account’s limit for the month, viewers will not be able to download content until the next month’s transfer bandwidth is applied to your account.
If you find that you regularly run out of transfer bandwidth, you might want to upgrade to a higher level of service. At the Premium account level, you can purchase additional blocks of transfer bandwidth and extra storage.
How to Purchase Additional Transfer Bandwidth
If you have a Premium account, you can purchase additional transfer bandwidth for your Screencast.com account. Extra transfer bandwidth can be purchased in 100 GB, 300 GB and 500 GB blocks. These additional blocks of transfer bandwidth roll over from one month to the next. Use the extra bandwidth whenever you need it, until it is gone.
This service can be excellent if you do a great deal of video tutorials that required a high level of detail, but no in high definition. This may not help someone running a DIY site trying to show people how to grout tile or install bathroom vanities, but if you want to show someone how to perform a function in excel, or on the web it can be extremely useful for just a few dollars per month.