Go Viral with Your Video

So you’ve bought the camera, shot the videos, and edited them down, but what’s the use if no one ever gets to see them? In the final leg of our three-part series, we take you through the steps to publish your video online, and share it with your faculty peers and students. Go on, spread the word!

For most folks, mention online video sharing and one name comes to mind— YouTube. With the level of ubiquity You- Tube has reached in the mindshare of internet users, it is not only how they were introduced to video sharing, but it’s probably the only video sharing site they’re even aware of! Not that that is a bad thing, really—the basic free account lets you upload videos up to 12 hours long or up to a maximum of 20 gigabytes of file size, and YouTube places no restriction on the number of videos you upload. Most of the common video formats, including the popular MPEG4, MOV and AVI formats that most cameras output to, are supported by YouTube, but you need to keep in mind that once you’ve uploaded the videos to YouTube, you cannot edit them any further, but you can annotate them with additional information and links. If the content you’ve recorded is proprietary, you can even choose to keep the videos private and only share the address directly with your class/peers. If not, you can fully exploit the true strength of YouTube— it’s a vast community that can interact with you, comment on, and critique your work.

But YouTube isn’t the only video sharing service around—keep in mind also that by posting your video here, you’re running the risk of being overrun by the noise that is inherent to the most popular video sharing site on the planet. There are many other alternatives which bring some unique propositions to the table as well. Try Vimeo, for instance.

The site packs in a user friendly interface that I personally prefer over YouTube’s, and has a fast growing and vibrant community to boot! With a free account, you can upload one high definition video a week, and for most individuals, that will be more than they need. Step up to a Plus account (available for US$59.95 or approximately Rs 3,000 per year) and you’re granted a 5 GB per week file size limit, faster uploads and the ability to embed the full high definition video in any blog or site of your choice. Aside from these two very popular options, you can check out alternatives by way of Metacafe and Dailymotion as well, but in my experience, YouTube or Vimeo should suffice most, if not all, needs.

Once your videos are online, you can directly embed these into your personal blog or the university website—rather than linking to a video which opens up in the Vimeo or YouTube website, embedding the video makes the final result look a lot more professional to your audience. In YouTube, for instance, you can click on the Share button and then the Embed option for the site to reveal the embed code—a piece of formatting language which you can directly insert into your blog’s HTML code, or provide to the webmaster of your university website to incorporate into the site’s code. Vimeo works in a similar fashion. And that’s it—you’re all set to go all out and publicise your new set of video tutorials across the academic community and to your students. Use the university’s Facebook account and your own social media presence to send out updates announcing the new content— there are many prospective students as well out there looking for a near-live experience of the teaching style of your institute, and such carefully curated content will go a long way in building your university’s (and your own personal) brand. Remember, the best institutions in the world—Stanford, MIT and Yale, to name a few, have already put a number of their courses online for the world at large to consume. What’s stopping you?

Useful Links:

Youtube Video Uploads:

http://bit.ly/ItDck2 V

Vimeo Basics:

http://bit.ly/Hy9xYb

MIT OpenCourseWare:

http://bit.ly/Ih5Fr2

Yale OpenCourseWare:

http://bit.ly/IzBbnG

OpenCourseWare Finder:

http://bit.ly/Ih5XhJ