It seems like it is getting fairly hard to find a place to host videos now that Google video has stopped accepting new content, YouTube is what it is, and the other players are varied.

Wikipedia has a chart of all the major players in hosting internet videos, but let me break down some of the options for you.

Google Video

• No longer accepting new video
• DRM available

Flickr:

• Videos are limited to 90 seconds in length, and 150MB in filesize
• HD available only on Pro accounts. ($25 a year)

Blip:

• “May not upload copyrighted third-party content, pornography, advertising, network marketing and MLM schemes, video game recordings or other prohibited content.” So nothing popular, I guess.
• 50/50 sharing of ad revenue on uploaded media.

Vimeo:

• Free service limited to 500M and 1 HD video a week. $60 a year ups it to 5G a week and unlimited HD uploads.
• Non-commercial use only

Yahoo Video:

• “Your video needs to be less than 150 MB, in WMV, ASF, QT, MOD, MOV, MPG, 3GP, 3GP2, or AVI format, and have audio”
• No copyright infringing or adult material is permitted.
• Has tags and categories like the Google properties.

So at the end of the day, it looks to be that YouTube is still the only game in town for hosting video that you do not have the capacity or bandwidth expense budget of hosting yourself and the constraints above don’t fit for you.

YouTube:

• 10 minutes and 2G file limitation.
• HD as much as you want. Reference to assorted hacks (where values of hacks = tips) and tip for embedding HD. Thanks Lifehacker.

So what do you do if you want to have a larger than 2G file, want to provide more than 10 minutes of playtime or don’t like the behavior of a YouTube like site?

Well I guess there’s always BitTorrent. I have heard that some independent film makers used The Pirate Bay to distribute their works. Since that’s kind of over, what’s left? What if you don’t want to use a centralized tracker? Well I guess you can use decentralized trackers and distributed databases as well.

You can’t really embed a torrent file into a web page though, and that’s the baseline user level experience now. You’re carving off a narrow slice of the internet indeed unless you make it that easy. Speaking of filmmakers and internet piracy, here is a recent interesting survey about the feelings and opinions of those involved.