Can anyone recommend a video hosting solution for me that will not re-encode (like Vimeo) or splash ads over my videos (YouTube)? Does anyone know anything about Amazon S3 Hosting?

i might well be very wrong, but other than hosting your own video i think any 'commercial' site is either going to re-encode to their specs, or charge you a great deal to host YOUR format of choice.

why are you asking in the first place? true, youtube can be both crass in it's advertising and re-encoding, but vimeo, especially paid plus or pro i find more than adequate....

I've found that everything Vimeo re-encodes ends up very "soft", which may be pleasant for a "film" look but I have some very detailed, high-quality nature scenes that look superb and crisp, even when I drop resolution, frame rate, bit rate, etc. But going through a Vimeo re-encode, all the sharpness is lost.

I'm using S3 currently. It is merely a bucket in which your content can reside, that has good distribution, especially when using Amazon CloudFront.

Very techie, low to no support with lots of unconventional pitfalls and obstacles. And of course you have to provide and embed your own player on web pages. For all that, it is very low-cost for good distribution.

And, if you like getting really geeky, look into Amazon Web Services, where you can fire up a Wowza media server. This gets a bit more expensive, but is a state-of-the-art media server which can work with on-demand content in S3.

For solutions that are not so self-supported, eg. if you need someone to call or email when your service goes down, you should look to private label hosting services like dacast and istreamlive (not just live), or for a more casual and less expensive approach just host your media on your web server.

Video Hosting for Business (http://www.iplayerhd.com) is very good with an option not to re-encode. there is a 30 day trial account.

Youtube "splashes" ads only if you monetize and you can disable features like additional suggested videos. Vimeo allows you to provide the original file for download so there's that workaround.

Thanks, guys. Seth, can you share a link to a particularly crisp video you have hosted on s3? ezs3 is a $20/mo video "front end" on s3 that handles some of the "techie" stuff...I may go that way.

This is pretty "crisp". (http://crisissimulations.com/demo/kb.html) Be sure to select the 800p resolution, and blow it up to full-screen. BTW, that's the latest version of JW Player Premium.

As you'll see, that's a little demo clip that is mostly built out of screencaps. I don't think I have any full-motion video of people on S3 that is publicly viewable.

But S3 isn't inherently sharp or fuzzy, it's all about the compression and encoding you do for your clip. Which is an art and a science all its own! With S3, or any other user-compressed-content service, you can make your clip fuzzy or crisp, fast or slow to first play, small or big. A good freeware guide is at Longtail Video. (http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/28838/mp4-video-encoding) Using their suggested sizes and bitrates would be a good place to start.

In the college streaming class I teach, we use Jan Ozer's "Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5" as a textbook. He also has a web site with a lot of good guidance and resources at streaminglearningcenter.com.

I do think of S3 as pretty techie. There are a few very unconventional pitfalls and obstacles and low to no support. I don't know anything about eZs3, but the idea of a managed service sounds pretty good for getting started.

Rackspace has a Cloud offering leveraging their partner, Akami's CDN. One of my coworkers characterized it as "dirt cheap," but AFAIK you don't get a built out CMS, fancy reports and the like. The end users can see the videos in Flowplayer, JW, etc. There are some online compression sites linked on the referenced link if you need different delivery formats.

More on this at Media storage solutions on the cloud and the Akamai CDN - Rackspace Cloud Files (http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/media/solutions/)

George, your suggestion (Video Hosting for Business) seems to be working out for me, I'll likely be going that way, at least to start.

Seth, I almost went with the S3 and ezS3, but the other solution is much more simple...we'll see how it performs.

Thanks for your help.