by Jay Newman

Video sharing websites such as Youtube have been enormously successful and show substantial traffic growth and visitors. The trends are also showing that increasing amounts of people are visiting video sites, rather than Google to research information. This might be the time to launch your own site. Below we detail the information to get you started.

1. Rather than aiming at a mass market, choose a niche for your video site. I niche could include, cooking video’s, car maintenance, howto’s are perhaps “bloopers” and comic video’s.

2. Choose a good domain name, the shorter and snappier the better. This goes hand in hand with choosing your niche. If you are creating a niche video sharing website, such as racing cars or say football, consider incorporating your keywords into the domain.

3. Choose a web host. You should consider a dedicated server as the load with video sharing websites is greater. However shared hosting or even a VPS or virtual private server should be ok to test your site, until you are getting decent traffic.

4. Standard shared hosting might not meet the software requirements of running video hosting. Almost certainly you will need to ensure your shared web host has installed ffmpeg. FFmpeg is a software that converts video to .flv format or any video format.

5. Users will probably upload their video’s in .avi or mp3 format, and your server will convert them on the fly using ffmpeg. Other software that might be required to encode and play your video’s will be ffmpeg-php, libogg

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