General concepts

Video files are just like any other file on your computer. However, generally, websites for hosting videos are specialized.

For example, if you’ve created a recording and have a .mp4 file of the video, you can place it on a generalized file-hosting platform like Google Drive or Dropbox. So long as you’ve shared it publicly, anyone else can download the file and view it on their computer. They can also likely play it back in their browser.

But you’re undoubtedly used to seeing video on sites like YouTube and Vimeo instead. There are several reasons for this:

• Streaming video requires more complex infrastructure than downloading a file to ensure users don’t encounter buffering or low image quality.

• Video hosting platforms can provide important additional features like closed captions, altering playback speed, and providing comments and ratings.

• You may want to embed your video content into a separate website. Video hosting platforms allow for this, whereas general file hosting often does not.

Best practice is to upload your videos to services specifically optimized for them. There are many such services besides YouTube that fit this description. Some are free while others are paid; some are entirely public while others allow you to share your content selectively; some are standalone services while others are integrated into the recording tools we discussed earlier.

If you are sharing with a limited audience, there may be cases where generalized file hosting is a good idea, but you will need to take more care to ensure your video is optimized for the web.

In the "Hosting Platforms" section, we’ll discuss several of the options available to you at NYU and their respective tradeoffs.

There are usually multiple ways to share your video. Many video hosts will have a dedicated page for a video once you upload it that includes the video itself, its title and description, a place for comments and links for viewers to either share the video or find related videos. Linking to this page is easy and works just about anywhere.

However, you will often want to include your video within other content, such as a Brightspace lesson. In such cases, you may want to embed the video. Embedding is one of the advantages of using a video host.

It's important to think about who the audience is for your video. For example, if you want to make a public-facing resource, a platform like YouTube may make sense. YouTube is free and well supported. But it provides few options to selectively share your content. It's either public, or it's not.

In contrast, you may want to make a video available only to people within NYU or even within your specific course. For that use, NYU Stream is a far better option since it integrates with NYU services like Brightspace. However, in contrast to YouTube, it's much harder to share content from NYU Stream with a public audience.

We'll review the permissions options for individual services in the Hosting platforms section.

Captions are an important accessibility feature for any video you use in your teaching.

Traditionally, captions have been very time consuming to create. In recent years, advances in AI have seen a vast improvement in the quality of automated captions, but they still generally fall short of meeting accessibility standards. They can misinterpret punctuation and syntax in misleading ways, and the words they get wrong are usually more obscure ones that may be critical to your lesson: proper nouns, technical terms, jargon, etc.

Most video hosting platforms now offer an option to generate automatic captions, but you should still expect to review and correct them. This is far more efficient than creating captions from scratch, but it is still a non-trivial effort, especially for longer videos. It's important to plan for this when you make videos and develop a strategy to complete it consistently.

Some platforms will require you to correct captions within their own software, but some hosting platforms will accept captions made by 3rd party vendors in common formats like ".srt" files. The cheapest of these are automated captions that are not much different than what video hosts may already provide. Human generated and/or corrected captions are more expensive, usually ranging from $1.50 - $2.50 per minute of video. This can accumulate to a significant cost, and you'll want to assess whether the size of your audience justifies it. For video that will reach many students or be used across several cohorts, this can be a worthwhile investment. For a brief announcement video going to twenty students, it probably would not be.

We'll discuss the specific captioning features of different services in the "Hosting Platforms" section.