Hosting your own videos - The pros and cons

When hosting a video on your own system instead of uploading it to Coull, there are several limitations to be aware of.

Pros:
You have full control of the video and can use your own streaming and analytics and the source.

Cons:
You loose the ability to have the video transcoded into many different video formats, for HTML5 , iPhone/iPad, mobile etc.
You loose the optimising of the video for web delivery, in high/low bandwidth situations.
You loose the ability to create screen shots from your video, there is a way round this as detailed below.

Screen Shots of your externally hosted video:

To do this we require a crossdomain.xml file to be host in the same location as your video on your hosting servers. All other on-line video companies provide the same thing, such as vimeo. On their domain that servers up their videos they have an open crossdomain.xml file. You can either copy theirs:

http://av.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml

or ours

http://players.content.coull.com/crossdomain.xml

and put into the same location as your video file.