April 2nd, 2009
Fliggo - YouTube without everybody else's stuff
Earlier this week, I asked if there was some better place to host video for schools than YouTube. YouTube is a piece of cake and widely used, but also filled up with a lot of junk. The last thing I want on a district or school website is “related video” suggestions at the end of an embedded video and I don’t really want to be encouraging third-graders to post videos of themselves on YouTube.
It turns out that there is a nifty place to host video called Fliggo. A number of suggestions came in, but my favorite so far was courtesy of @jswiatek on Twitter. He recommended Fliggo, a site that essentially lets you build your own YouTube for free.
Fliggo allows you to upload your own video, link to YouTube videos (minus those pesky related videos at the end), and allow other people to post videos on the site. Those “other people” can be anyone (YouTube style) or registered members of your video site, allowing you to really restrict and moderate what gets posted.
Like videos on YouTube, Fliggo videos can be embedded in a site so that anyone with Flash can view them without downloading the full video. Better yet, it is simple to customize your Fliggo site, upload a school/district logo, etc.
Overall, the service is at least as fast as YouTube; the only drawback seems to be a fairly small default embedded resolution and a large Fliggo logo on embedded content. The company plans to add HD support shortly, however, as well as the ability to assign a domain to your site (currently, for example, I could build zdeducation.fliggo.com, but couldn’t create zdeducationvideo.com using their service).
Fliggo certainly gets my vote. We’ll be using it for all of our district video hosting needs and I’ll be creating whatever personal video sharing sites I might need on the service as well. I’m looking forward to watching this service grow and seeing what business models emerge.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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| 04/02/09
