Here are some ideas to help webmasters to make a choice about offering video streaming or video downloads from their website.
Streaming videos
Pros
- Users need a software if they want to steal the video content
- It provides an instant access to video
- If the video is very long, the user may be interested in one part of the video and there will be no wasted bandwidth since the user will watch the video sequence that he wanted.
Cons
- Streaming consume the highest amount of bandwidth compared to any other online content distribution (audio streaming, webpage pageload, video download)
- It requires a good internet connection
- The access to the video should be restricted if there is no video ads
- You should have video ads right from the beginning to monetize your videos, otherwise, the cost of bandwidth and web server will be too high
Video download service
Pros
- You can limit the number of allowed download times to limit the bandwidth that will be used by the downloads of videos.
- The internet connection quality isn’t as important as with video streaming
- The cost is not high because the required bandwidth for download can be quite low.
Cons
- The user has to way the end of the download to watch the video
- If the video length is big, the user may get frustrated because the download will take time
- The user does not have access to the video right away
- The user can instantly upload the video file right away to a file sharing website and make it available for free to other internet users.