It’s no huge secret that more and more people are adding video to website to interact with their viewers and keep them on their sites for longer periods of time. Smart business owners everywhere are taking advantage of the web video trend to grow their business by capturing their customer’s attention through the power of high quality interactive web videos.

Thanks to video sharing sites like Youtube and Viddler its now very easy adding video to website, but not everyone wants to display Youtubes logo or any other video sharing sites logo on their videos when they embed the video on their website. Unfortunately when you use these services you must comply with their terms and this might not fit in with your plans for the video.

To have full control over the way your video looks the length of time it plays for and who sees it, you will want to host your videos yourself. Adding video to website without using video sharing sites like Youtube will require a little extra work from you, but don’t freak out because this is a lot easier than you might think.

I will try not get to technical but instead give you a simple overview of what it takes to adding video to website, so that after reading this article you can go away with the confidence knowing you have the knowledge and a better understanding of what it takes to add video to your website.

First and foremost you must have access and administrative use to your own website and have a hosting account that can handle the load because videos do take up a lot of bandwidth, so you want to have a hosting account that is suitable especially if you are expecting a lot of traffic. You can alternatively use a specialist hosting company just to host your videos and it’s not expensive at all.

Then you want to convert your videos to Flash format, Flash is the Internet’s standard video file, it’s a lot smaller than other video files and most if not all Internet browsers can play Flash. There are many tools online you can use to convert your videos some are even free.

You will then need SWFObject, which is a small JavaScript file used to embed your flash video into your html page, this is probably the best method you can use to embed your flash video to your web page due to its flexibility. You can learn more about it by visiting the code.google.com website.

Lastly to adding video to website you will need a flash player, this is a media player used to stream and play your videos on your web page and offer the viewer features like the play, stop, pause button and controls to adjust the volume.

Ok now you know what components are necessary for you to add your own hosted videos to your website. Obviously there is a lot more into bringing it all together but hopefully now you have a clearer understanding of what your next step should be to adding video to website.