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I have previously blogged about Video Hosting Options for Drupal web sites. In that discussion, I talked about Kaltura, Amazon S3 and BrightCove. Others have also commented about Viddler and Twistage.

We have recently been involved with another video site which uses the Ooyala Backlot system. For the most part, Ooyala is very similar to the tools provided by Brightcove and Kaltura, however, there are a few features that we are really impressive.

1) Extensive ADs Management System
Using the Ooyala Backlot system, the administrators can easily insert overlays, pre-rolls and other advertisement into the videos. The great thing is that a lot of these integration does not require any programming knowledge. This allows for the easy management of Ads by non technical staff members.

2) Detailed Analytics System

S3, a great technology provided by Amazon, allows users to store an unlimited amount of files through simple web service calls. Amazon S3 is very cost effective, only charging 15 cents per gigabyte and additional charges for the bandwith that is used during retrieveing and sending files. The scalability of Amazon S3 allows video hosting sites to trust that the videos will be available at all times and will not
add to load times when playing videos.

The flashvideo module allows users to convert uploaded video files to Flash format with the help of FFMPEG. These video files after being converted can be embedded into nodes by using a special placeholder, [video], in the node body. The project page mentions that the module has been tested with two great flash players which are:

• Dash Media Player