Best Video Hosting Platforms For Online Courses On WordPress For 2022/2023
The Membership Machine Show – Jonathan Denwood and Spencer Forman – for advice, tips, and insight on planning, running, and growing a successful membership website, plus what is the best technology solutions from WordPress and SaaS, plus interviews with membership industry experts.
#1 – YouTube
Prices Free
#2 – Vimeo
Prices Starter $9 | Standard – $25 | Advanced $65
#3 – Wistia
Prices Plus – $24 | Pro $99 | Advance $399
#4 – Spotlightr
Prices Spark $9 | Aurora $19 | Polaris $49 | Supernova $149
#5 – Presto Player with Bunny.net
Prices Starter $69 | Pro $99
#6 – USCREEN – https://www.uscreen.tv/
Prices Basic $79 | Growth $159
#7 – Vidyard – https://www.vidyard.com/pricing/
Prices Free | Pro $19 | Business $145
#8 – Sprout Video – https://sproutvideo.com/
Prices Seed $10 | Sprout $35 | Tree $75 | Forest $295
This Week Show’s Sponsors
Sensei LMS: Sensei LMS
BlogVault: BlogVault
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
LaunchFlows: LaunchFlows
Episode Transcript
[00:00:03.850] Intro
Welcome to the membership machine show. Talking you through your membership website, from the initial idea all the way to the finished product. Here’s your host, Jonathan Denwood.
[00:00:16.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the membership machine show this is got a great topic here. We’re going to be talking about video, and video hosting for your membership website. If you’re doing a membership website, almost always, you’re going to want to host. You get a one video, and we’ve got some of the best platforms, some great recommendations, and some great insights. It should be a great show. I’m going to let my great co-host he’s caffeinated, he’s already saying that everything he says is based on facts. We assume by that out. Spencer, would you like to introduce yourself?
[00:01:06.210] – Spencer Foreman
Spencer Foreman previously of many other URLs still exist. But now I’d like everyone to find me over at my hub. Spencerforman.com. That’s F-O-R-M-A-N.
[00:01:19.610] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s your home now, is it?
[00:01:22.040] – Spencer Foreman
What I’ve done is I’ve created a hub where you can find all of the information and the products and services they offer as well as because I publish in so many places, it’s a place where I’m really trying to aggregate the feeds of everything I’m doing. So if really somebody wants to start out, it’s like the Grand Central Station of where to go instead of having to bounce from one URL to another. So hopefully that’s helpful for anyone who wants to find me.
[00:01:45.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, let’s go straight into it. Let’s talk about the big gorilla dominates video, YouTube. So what’s your thoughts about YouTube in general and specifically should you use it for your membership website? Over to you, Spencer.
[00:02:07.190] – Spencer Foreman
Well, one of the first and most important concepts for any of these hosting companies is to understand what kind of content you’re posting and what is the reason you’re posting. So specifically, if the content you’re posting is designed to get you more prospects, more interested viewers, more people that would buy your other stuff, then you should use a platform like a YouTube that is essentially a glorified search engine and you should make your content discoverable. I e it’s not hidden or private link. Why? Because content, as I’ve said in so many of our shows and interactions is the way versus organic SEO to actually get people today, tomorrow, and in the future. Right. Social media, paid traffic, organic SEO content that is shareable and discoverable is the best way to get people in. So for example, maybe you have a sample course or you have some of your content in a course that’s public. Use YouTube for that and make it discoverable because that’s the way that people through that algorithm are going to find you and be pulled into your web. And then the second thing is why? Why am I doing this? Why is the content out there?
[00:03:24.210] – Spencer Foreman
Well, some people have asked me, even as of today, oh, how can I lock my videos down so nobody can download them. And I’m like, Why do you care? We live in a world where all of us have these tools like we’re using today. If you can see it on the screen, you can save it. There is zero chance of you protecting content from naughty people. But if you try to do things that make naughty people slower or slow them down, you’re hurting your good customers, you’re hurting your good prospects, you’re making it annoying. Oh, you can’t right click on the screen, you can’t share the link, you can’t do this or that. The only people who will be hurt by that will be your honest customers. And I say, why are you doing it? Give away as much as possible and then have people pay you for the thing that matters, which is the relationship. So YouTube is a prime example of a great way to be discovered. Share and put content that will lead more people to what you really are selling, which is your relationship. And don’t be freaked out about most of it.
[00:04:30.790] – Spencer Foreman
However, we’ll talk about the fact that a lot of the things that you’re doing of course you don’t want to just put the money from the bank vault on the sidewalk. You just want to make it not hard on your good customers.
[00:04:41.690] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally agree. What you have outlined, you cannot in Age of Zoom and other video screen capture programs, you cannot protect your content totally. It’s just not feasible. Just like images, you can track usage, there’s ways that you can find if people are utilizing images, blah, blah, blah. And the same is with video. But on the other hand, if it’s paid content that has value, you do not want to offer it on a freely accessible platform because it will devalue or subconsciously the value of that content. Like what Spencer said, you want to use YouTube to promote you, your brand and your courses and offer as much value in that promotional YouTube content as you can. You are not trying to become there are a small minority of people on YouTube that through their YouTube channel make a very good income. There’s a larger group that make not substantial income, but it’s a reasonable amount that makes a difference to their life. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about providing, utilizing YouTube to promote yourself, your course, and to encourage people to sign up for your courses. So it has its place, doesn’t it Spencer?
[00:06:31.380] – Spencer Foreman
Yes. Keep in mind, this is just factually true, okay? There is not a lot of content that generates the type of views that you will monetize by way of the advertisement money from YouTube. Remember, like, look at a scale, right? There are just as many people who make a significant livelihood, six, seven figures, many of them my clients, and I’ve experienced this on my own, where the content of the courses, the recurring membership, is what makes them that six and seven figures. Or even if it’s just a couple of year, YouTube content that gets advertising income is a completely different type of content, right? It has to be formulated to keep attention and get the views and get the algorithm. And those two things are not the same. So just because you’re using YouTube to host it, don’t think that you should be thinking about both things at once. You should not.
[00:07:28.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, yeah, I totally agree with you. I’m just pointing out because I did get asked questions and it’s totally understandable. But before we go on to the rest of the show, I’ve got a small break of a couple of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments.
[00:07:45.420] – Spencer Foreman
Folks, are you looking for ways to make your content more engaging? Sensei LMS by Automatic is the original WordPress solution for creating and selling online courses. Sensei’s new interactive blocks can be added to any WordPress page or post. For example, interactive videos let you pause videos and display quizzes, lead generation forms, surveys and more for a 20% off discount for the tribe. Just use the code Wptonic all one Word when checking out and give Sensei a try today.
[00:08:18.510] – Jonathan Denwood
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[00:09:55.890] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back, Spencers, in full, full review mode. Before we go on to the rest of the content, I want to point out that I’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors. I’ve also got a great list of the best plugins and other solutions if you’re looking to start a membership site. Got great recommendations and a list of the major plugins that you should think about. To get all these goodies, all you have to do is go over to WP Tonic Stroke Deal, WP Tonic Stroke Deals and you can get all these free goodies and you can sign up for the WP Tonic weekly newsletter. What more could you ask for? So on to the next one, Jackson.
[00:10:51.020] – Spencer Foreman
That’s what I would ask for.
[00:10:53.190] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go. I would have never thought that this goes on to the next Vimeo. I think they’re Dutch company, aren’t they? Lived in Holland, actually. I lived in Holland. Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I think I might be totally wrong. I normally am, but I think I’m not in this. Loved holland, actually. Nice people, the Dutch. What’s your views on vimeo?
[00:11:28.910] – Spencer Foreman
I’ve been on Vimeo for much of my content since they started. They are super solid. Pricing is very, very fair for really powerful, simple to use tools. So what I would suggest is vimeo is the original OG alternative to YouTube. Going back to what we just talked about, if you have content that you know is for membership purposes and you want to organize it, you want to protect it by domain, which is something that I can introduce here. One of the easiest and best ways to give satisfaction is that you can put content in Vimeo that by default, they have an option that says where, if at all, can this be viewed? And then you have to list the full domain or the wild card of your domain. That’s the most amazing simple way to do anything, because then they take care of really protecting all the stuff inside of a folder or a compilation of videos. And so what I’ve used over the years is Vimeo for the things that don’t want to be or that I don’t want to have on YouTube, right? Hey, it’s Spence and I’ve got a new course and here’s a sample on YouTube.
[00:12:34.300] – Spencer Foreman
And then go by the real membership. And the content of those lessons is actually hosted on Vimeo, which therefore easily embeds inside of WordPress or anywhere else, by the way. It can also be used in its own standalone format. So, I mean, in some cases, you don’t really need a full website. You could do like what we’re talking about these days with our launch kit. You could just have a sales funnel that sells access and you give access to content that’s just a link into Vimeo. And all it’s doing is showing the Vimeo. If, of course, your courses are mostly video, right, and not a lot of other stuff. So Vimeo gets a big thumbs up from me. It’s gone through some changes. In the early days, they had a lot of hiccups, they had a lot of like, growing pain stuff, but they figured their stuff out. They really have. So kudos to them.
[00:13:24.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Highly recommend change the prices because they used to have VBO plus Vimeo plus VBO something. It’s now start at nine, standard at 25, advance at 65. These are the monthly prices.
[00:13:40.890] – Spencer Foreman
That’s a good point. Let me see what I’m on, because I’m on maybe an OG plan too. I’m on Pro, 20GB a week, 1 year. Cost me $17 a month, billed annually. There are features that I think you’re referring to, like if you wanted to do live streaming, but that would be something where I would use what we’re doing.
[00:14:03.890] – Jonathan Denwood
They changed the names and the plan. I just went to the website just before we went live and it’s now start a standard advance.
[00:14:16.630] – Spencer Foreman
Yeah, I’m on the website now and I see they’ve also got like Pro Unlimited. So there must be some legacy stuff. But the bottom line is, go back to the conversation I’ve mentioned in a few shows ago. If you’re running a membership site for any site where you’re going to have this kind of content, you would just be kidding yourself, just fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re going to spend two hundred dollars to three hundred dollars a month for your hosting, your software, licenses, your content. I mean, just be realistic. You’re going to spend $3,600 a year, likely. So if your business of selling your membership stuff won’t get you back that much, you should rethink what you’re doing.
[00:14:55.250] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the one thing we need to discuss before we move on is dependent. You mustn’t host the PTO on your normal hosting plan. That’s my recommendation for performance. The cost, you’re going to get slowed. What’s your views?
[00:15:20.490] – Spencer Foreman
Let’s define what that means. I think in fairness there’s a misunderstanding and it’s reasonable. But let’s talk about photos and let’s talk about videos. In the old days, back when I was a kid, photos on the internet were little tiny crappy one megapixel pictures, right? But now we have iPhone fourteen s and so forth that literally take 4K images that could theoretically be.
[00:15:50.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Just talk to AI engine.
[00:15:56.070] – Spencer Foreman
The bottom line is we’re living in a world of abundance. So with images, many more people maybe understand this, that you can’t just take reasonably the photo that comes out of your iPhone, whatever, and post it on a website. Because anything more than a couple of hundred kilobits per picture and some exceptions you might go up to almost a megabyte. But if you have your web page in the 1 MB plus range or more, it starts to slow down the experience over the aggregate. So there are in images, scaling and density of the pixels, right? And so we have compression software and other stuff that basically even in WordPress directly, it makes 14 different copies of your image thumbnails. So that depending on the size of the browser’s screen. All right, so conceptually people understand that. What many people don’t understand with video is you can’t just take a native video off your phone or your digital camera and put it on your website because it has to be transcoded scaled, density of pixels and a bunch of other things like frame rate in order to be optimized for streaming. And I want to use streaming, not streaming streaming.
[00:17:11.710] – Spencer Foreman
That’s not related to you. That’s related to some other broadcasters. Say streaming streaming because streaming is a very special type of video hosting. That is why YouTube and Vimeo and all these other services exist. They transcode the native video into an optimized streaming format that’s lower in size and has the capability of having an embedded player. You take the embedded player or the link to the remotely hosted video and that is what you put on your website. And when we think of YouTube, everybody gets it, right? The reason YouTube exists and is so popular because that’s where you put your video stuff, but then you take the link or the embed for that video and that is what you put into your WordPress site. If you try to put your video into WordPress, a regular web page host like NGINX or Apache or anything else, any of those server protocols will fail very hard on you very fast. Like one user will take down your site if they’re running some kind of video that’s not optimized and you’re trying to host it. So that’s something that not as many people seem to understand, but once you get your head around it, that’s why you use a service such as those that were discussed.
[00:18:25.810] – Jonathan Denwood
So just take what Spencer said. Don’t forget about utilizing your normal hosting to run your videos. And you get this discussion because they’re running courses for state enterprises or they’ve got to meet certain security, blah, blah, blah, and they get in their mind the only way they can meet it is to run it on their own server, blah, blah, blah. And they are for some very special circumstances where you might look in a certain budget, but in general, forget about it.
[00:19:05.090] – Spencer Foreman
I want to point out, though, even if you did that, it doesn’t change that this is a factual thing, Your Honor. It doesn’t change the fact that a.
[00:19:14.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Regular can I help me by title.
[00:19:22.950] – Spencer Foreman
The server technology that we use, NGINX, Apache, Lightspeed, that is not streaming hosting server technology, that is static page technology. And if you try to put a video into, let’s say, a WordPress site and use what’s there without it being properly transcoded and offered up by a streaming server, it’s like sort of asking your friend, hey, can you bring me the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and drop it off in my mailbox? And you’re never going to get any mail while that’s happening because your box will just fill up. So you must use, even if it’s a private server like Amazon AWS, you can do your own streaming server there without using one of these services, but it has to be a streaming server.
[00:20:09.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, we have had a couple and we used a service called WP Stream. They’ve been a part there on a couple of instances where we had some quasar state requirements and they provided the service. So you are right, but you can do it. That’s what I’m saying. Your facts are right. Thank you. The day that I struggle with what’s your thoughts about Vistia?
[00:20:55.430] – Spencer Foreman
Okay, so I have an origin story with Vistia. The founders are a really clever bunch. They started in Boston, and one of the original original founders is the OG guy, Adam Zayas, who’s my age, a little older, and the younger kids that he was supervising did really well. Chris and Brennan, and there’s a whole team of the original. Now.
[00:21:19.950] – Jonathan Denwood
They started in a white.
[00:21:23.630] – Spencer Foreman
In.
[00:21:23.970] – Jonathan Denwood
A startup incubator, didn’t they?
[00:21:27.150] – Spencer Foreman
I think there was definitely some seed capital and I don’t remember what the incubator was, but when they started was sometime in the era where I was doing the original one. WD first web designer. So I’m going to guess around 2008, seven, eight, something like that. But the point is, I went to visit them in person, hung with them when they were still in their first offices. And at the time, they were the first, quite frankly, to come up with what is now an accepted sort of marketplace thing, which is business video hosting. Extremely talented, very energetic group. It’s a big team now. They have grown to the scale where they’re successful, but they follow the Jason Freed david Hennemeyer Hansen Chicago base camp philosophy, which I’ve talked about a lot, which is other than the fact that they took seed capital and they have investors. They just decided to keep the company and run the company and make it, like, a long term thing, which I love. Their pricing is expensive, but worth it. In other words, it’s concierge pricing for concierge level of quality and service. They, unlike a lot of the services, have focused on innovative features that allow you to track and see what people are doing with your content.
[00:22:41.220] – Spencer Foreman
They also have inside of their services the capability to run full blown, like pay, to get access to this and that in a container. I’ve done lots of clever stuff over the years with them. I will admit to you, though, that I no longer find their product or service to be compelling for everybody, because it is only worth it if you’ve got a product market fit and you know you can make back the money it’s costing you for their service. Whereas in the early days, it was the only game in town. Now some of the other choices we’ll talk about are a much better fit for I’m starting a new idea today, and there’s more tools natively in WordPress to make that data also accessible.
[00:23:21.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think what you’ve outlined is about right. They did have some marketing capture functionality that was extremely original. Around video.
[00:23:36.950] – Spencer Foreman
I want to give you like a metric. Okay? If you look at the pricing plan and you go monthly or annually go monthly. Can you mute your mic? Because your MIC’s doing that underwater, so I’ll just do it for you. So basically, like their plus plan, it’s $24 a month, it’s 20 videos. As we’ll talk about something like Bunny.net or even Vimeo, that’s not even in the same stratosphere as what you can do for $24 a month. For $24 a month, you could have like literally all your membership content and more on something like Bunny.net. But that’s what’s so special about what they do and to their compliment, it’s a concierge type of thing. So they’re really trying to sell to a certain type of user who’ve already demonstrated a need for what they have.
[00:24:28.350] – Jonathan Denwood
To offer versus it’s clearly why they pitched themselves. And they kind of seen as the Rose Royce service. And they do provide a really concierge quality service. Vimeo? Not quite, but Vimeo is strong. You just got to look at it onto the next player. Spotlighter. Spotlight. How would you pronounce it later? It was called Voodoo Video. At one time, the founders had, I think, a bit of a bust up, and then they rebanded. I utilize this. I got a lifetime deal with them when they were on appsuma, and I used it on my own website and they progressed. Love the names with their price plans. They got Spark, it seems supernova. They got cosmos. Given full marks within the price in naming conventions, I think it’s a pretty good service if you’re looking at VCL or Vimeo. I think they’ve made it a competitive player was your own fault.
[00:26:01.750] – Spencer Foreman
I can say, like the up and the downside. The downside to get out of the way, because just in fairness, I’ve not used it since, is that I was using them when they shit the bed, and they shit the bed really badly.
[00:26:14.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Okay, what kind of sold in you?
[00:26:19.850] – Spencer Foreman
I can’t try to emphasize how painful this was, but with video, it’s not like, oh, I can grab a bunch of photos and move it here, move it there, or a bunch of documents. It’s like video. As we just discussed, I had clients, thousands of videos transcoded, and the process of transcoding is hundreds of hours of time. And when they shit the bed, we had to get those clients off of there. And that was extraordinarily painful. Okay, so it’s maybe a good time to bring up the fact that I discuss all the time in WordPress how you want to limit your externalities right. For SMTP, for things like your payment gateways. This is one of those externalities that you need. You need other than doing a self hosted AWS, you’re still actually on AWS and could get taken down. But this externality is like you need to choose this relationship very carefully because it’s going to be painfully hard, just time wise, to move a lot of content. It also brings up another point, which I think we could say across the board, i, as a practice, recommend that people keep their native files organized in their own cloud.
[00:27:31.650] – Spencer Foreman
Right? So it could be on Google or anything else. But don’t throw away the original files are like, absolutely. Because the day will come when somebody’s going to cause you to go, well, I got to move. And it might not be easier to download all that stuff or even possible you might need to have it in the original format to transcode it elsewhere. They look like you’ve done something new. I kind of roll my eyes a little bit, though, at their pricing because I like that they have this Spark thing for $7 a month. But then I look at it and it says 25 videos. I’m like, well, 25 videos, that’s such an artificial bullshit thing. Each video could be 5 seconds long. So what I get 25 times five that makes no sense. The bandwidth and the storage. Okay, 50GB, I get that. The random 25 videos, that’s a stupid number because in their next plan, up $16 gets you unlimited videos and then only four times the amount of storage. So the numbers don’t even make sense because I’m paying twice as much and they’re giving me four times the storage and bandwidth.
[00:28:36.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Why the number one tip of all these? I really wouldn’t look at their free low price offerings. Most of them have arbitrary kind of limits that you assume blow through it’s there just as a headline price, really, for marketing. So all of them I would be a low price. The initial entry price, always look at the middle one. That’s my little pitch.
[00:29:07.810] – Spencer Foreman
You’re going to need that for any real business anyway. But I think we’re living.
[00:29:13.190] – Jonathan Denwood
They’Ve left a really bad taste in your mouth. Was that down to their bus stop? Because I think they had internal the excitement.
[00:29:23.130] – Spencer Foreman
The promise of their original thing is, quite frankly, where our next thing we’re going to talk about bunny Net succeeds beyond expectations is that it was to be like all the capabilities and storage at the price of an Amazon bucket, but with the interface that made it as easy to use as YouTube or Vimeo, right? So you get this unbelievable capability and volume and storage and so forth and use, but with the capabilities and ease of use of something refined like a YouTube vimeo wistia. And that was what its original product promised and looked like. But in reality it shit the bed because the interface looked good but didn’t really work so well. And then they had their blow up or whatever happened, and then all hell broke loose. And I just said, I can’t be around with this. Like, I have a client who is using the service that her whole business is a seven figure business of videos, and she couldn’t afford to sit around watching them duke it out and stuff. So whatever.
[00:30:23.530] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, on to the next one. Onto the next one. All right, what are we doing for time? Because I’m just going to judge you because Spence is going to after this, spence is going to want to cut my pool. Are you called, babe? You’re not going to get rid of I agree.
[00:30:57.160] – Spencer Foreman
Are you contributing all this anthropomorphic stuff to me? Like Spencer’s mad? I’m right here. I’m not mad. I’ve never been mad. I’m just right.
[00:31:06.430] – Jonathan Denwood
I can make you bad really quick. Let’s talk about presto. Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I want to talk about Presto.
[00:31:17.440] – Spencer Foreman
You can say it. I’m not precious. Just say it. You were talking about Presto Player and Bunny Net.
[00:31:21.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Presto player with Bunny Net. But you don’t need presto player. You can just use Bunny Net. They start with Bunny Net because a really fantastic company, they really came on, went on my radar, and then suddenly through Adam, actually, Adam Presley, who is one of the joint founder of Presto Player, he’s coming on the WP Tonic Interview show in a couple of weeks time. I’ve had another great conversation with Adam. He’s a really interesting dude. Should be a great conversation. Let’s start with Bunny Net. Really exciting service, strong. What are they and how do they fit into this conversation? Spencer.
[00:32:17.950] – Spencer Foreman
First of all, Bunny Net gets one of my highest reviews here. I mean, comparable to Whisky, YouTube and Vimeo for the reasons I’ll discuss. I’m not angry about this, but I want to clarify somebody. Well, you said you’re going to let me at least explain because it’s just like explaining transcoding. Okay? Presto Player doesn’t do hosting of videos. That’s not what it does. It’s a tool for managing and embedding videos from a variety of hosts. You could do YouTube, vimeo with whatever, including Bunny.net. They have an API connection that you pay a premium for that lets you do something that Bunny Net natively doesn’t do. Bunny.net works like YouTube in the sense that when you want to put your videos on there, you just go to Bunny.net, you pay your price or use the free trial. And then like YouTube, you upload your videos, it transcodes them and they manage the library. Done. When you want to embed them, you either grab the URL or you grab the embed code and paste it. It’s 100% as easy and is exactly like YouTube as you can get, even for paid content. So, like I was describing with Vimeo, if I want to put my membership content nowadays, I would put it on Bunny Net because I can create a library of paid or private content.
[00:33:43.230] – Spencer Foreman
Just say, lock it down to this URL and I’m done. And no matter where I put it in YouTube, it’s fine. Now, Adam and I don’t think his partner on that is sujay, is another developer. He came up with a very, very good idea, which was one of the things Bunny Net doesn’t do is it doesn’t allow you to upload videos to the media library like we’re talking about in WordPress. It doesn’t give you a visual interface to see the videos that you’ve uploaded. So, like, remember when we started today’s conversation? What do people do wrong? They try to upload a video to their media library, not transcoded and all hell breaks loose. Well, if you use the Pro version of Presto Player, it essentially uses the API capability of Bunny Net to let you use your media library to manage. Now, in theory, and for some people, that’s actually really a cool sounding feature. But in practice, what we have found and tested is that anybody who’s actually skilled enough to run a membership site and make membership content is already skilled enough to understand how to upload a video to YouTube and grab the embed code.
[00:34:57.080] – Spencer Foreman
And when you have that skill, there’s virtually. No benefit to presto player versus just using Bunny Net natively as the host, just like you would for YouTube. Because like we just talked about all these examples. I put up the whole library. It’s there and I copy the videos and then I have and that’s it. And that’s what seems to put you around the bend. Other than that though, the tools of Bunny.net and the hosting are everything that was promised originally by that last one we talked about but actually delivered. And the cost is extraordinarily good.
[00:35:35.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you give some outline based on your experience with houses matches about what Bunny.net judge charge in reality? Got any insult?
[00:35:49.170] – Spencer Foreman
First of all, they have a bunch of tools which are not the point of today’s conversation, but let’s say you’re using video hosting. They have a network of CDNS content delivery networks around the globe. So if you wanted to, you not only can have streaming content, but it could be optimized to be delivered from the closest proximity to where somebody’s asking but when you talk about they have all these like different calculators, right? So I’m looking at their thing and just hold on 1 second for five terabytes. I don’t even know where to go with that because it’s such a huge number. I’m going to put it like this. For any membership, I’m just going to simplify it because the numbers are so generous as to not even be comprehensible. Like five terabytes is $50 a month. So like most websites who have a membership content, they’re going to have maybe a couple hundred megabytes of content. And if they have hundreds of paying customers, they’re going to stream maybe hundreds of megabytes, maybe a couple hundred gigabytes right, a month. So your average cost for running Bunny Net is going to be in the dollars for anything you can possibly imagine.
[00:37:02.080] – Spencer Foreman
Like a really well to do membership site is going to have a bill like $12 a month or something like that. But what I’m saying, it’s incomprehensible how generous Bunny.net is for the yeah, I.
[00:37:18.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Failed to be one client, got one client that has a gaming membership. They train people to play a specific game better and they’re with a Vimeo custom to have their own Vimeo manager. So just imagine what kind of video bandwidth they’re utilizing. They got their own personalized manager from Vimeo. And I tried to persuade them to look at Bunny and I failed. But they did look at it and I just tried to persuade I think there were some specific things that Vimeo did for them that Bunny couldn’t. But it’s just fantastic, isn’t it?
[00:38:00.440] – Spencer Foreman
I found their calculator. Yes. Like, again, wistia outstanding. We just talked about $24 a month gets you 20 videos. Okay. Here. So if you were to go to the Bunny.net calculator and let’s say we’re just talking about one video, it depends on your video. But I do enough videos. An average tutorial video of mine, maybe ten minutes is like 10GB, right? I mean, just let’s do one video at a time and you put it on their entire world of CDNS, all eight contact points, right? That one video at your volume pricing would allow you. Let’s do 10GB. Let’s see, if you stream that out 100GB, it would cost you like a dollar and two cent a month for average download, right? So let’s say your library at twelve videos, you multiply that times ten. Like I said, it’s like $10 for, let’s say, an average course to be streamed optimized around the world. That’s crazy, right? And even if you got onto the whole conversation of something else, the big difference though, is like the management stuff. So it works just like you, too. I’m not saying Wisty and all the other ones, don’t they have a similar interface, but this is just like the benefits of an AWS with a really simple interface that lets you essentially create what you want without all the fluff.
[00:39:35.040] – Spencer Foreman
And.
[00:39:38.890] – Jonathan Denwood
We offer Presto Players part of our bundle. And if you just want to go and buy Direct for one site, $69 at the present moment, it’s not ridiculously priced. And we just find with the API key and it provides the interface inside WordPress and the clientele just like it.
[00:40:00.930] – Spencer Foreman
Spencer, I will say the two things that Presto Player does that if you’re offering it, make it worthwhile. Number one, it makes the connectivity to a Bunny.net site automatic. So even though it’s as simple as just signing up and clicking on the streaming and making the name of a content folder, bunny net does that automatically when it’s connected to Presto Player. So you can get the number two, which is sort of true. There is for some people the value of only seeing the media library, right? And what it does is essentially through the API, it lets you upload a video and then you see the video that you can just say, use that video. And for some level of people, that’s beneficial. So gauge the cost. Because the one thing I have validated is unlike a lot of other software, they’re running a man in the middle. API web hook. API web hook. You have to have a licensed copy connected to their servers that then connects you to Bunny net. There’s no, like, get the license and just use it wherever you want kind of thing. You are literally using them in the middle.
[00:41:09.550] – Spencer Foreman
And for many sophisticated users, I’m saying that just becomes like, why am I bothering?
[00:41:15.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see. We come. We’re going to go for our mid break. Got a couple of messages from our great sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:41:27.070] – Spencer Foreman
Hey, it’s Spence from Launchflows.com. If you’ve been looking for a fast and easy way to create powerful sales funnels on WordPress, then look no further than Launch flows. In just minutes, you can easily create instant registration upsells, downsells, order bumps, one click checkouts, one time offers custom thank you pages. And best of all, no coding is required. For as little as $50 per year, you can own and control your entire sales funnel machine with launch flows. Get your copy today. This podcast episode is brought to you by Lifter LMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training based membership website or any type of elearning project, lifter LMS is the most secure, stable, well supported solution on the market. Go to lyfterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code podcast 20. That’s podcast 20. Enjoy the rest of your show.
[00:42:36.790] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re coming back. We’ve been having a bit of a chat about video and video hosting. I just want to point out that if you’re looking to have a membership or learning management system on WordPress and you should go to WP Tonic. We are the hosting specialist when it comes to membership and learning management systems. We offer top tier hosting management plus a suite of plugins up to $10,000 of value. One of them is Presto player and we’ll configure Bunny for you. Plus you got access to me and my expert team. It’s a great package at a great honest price. So go over to WP Tonic and look what we got to offer. We love you to be part of the tribe. So that wasn’t bad, was it? I’m to get better at those efforts. There you go.
[00:43:31.670] – Spencer Foreman
Indeed, your honor.
[00:43:33.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you so much. I love that honor. There’s a few people in the WordPress community that would exchange that Word honor with something else, but we won’t say that I don’t bloody care. On to the next one. Struck with the name you screen use screen. Yescreen. What’s your thoughts about you screen Just.
[00:44:09.220] – Spencer Foreman
For full disclosure, I’ve never used it, but I can see from their pricing plans and such that I would more characterize this as a membership sales platform. So this kind of would fit into the category of like we talked about in another show, membership platforms where it’s all in one. And the big difference here when you look at the pricing is they’re taking a piece of your action, right? So the basic plan on a monthly payment starts at $99 a month, first of all, for 50 hours, which, by the way, that’s a fair metric. In other words, I’m not saying the price is good, but I’m saying it’s fair to say we’re going to measure not on the quantity of videos, but on the hours of storage or something like that. Interestingly. It’s not on the streaming, which is good because then you’re not getting penalized for your success. And the reason that they do it that way, which again, I think is intelligent, is they’re saying, look, you get a bucket that holds 50 hours of video, but when you sell it and people consume it. We’re going to need a little something for the effort.
[00:45:12.270] – Spencer Foreman
So they charge you subscriber per month. So if somebody’s paying you to gain access to that content, they’re going to take fifty cents. Now, I would just relate this to any of those other platforms and say, look, for some people this is really a good set up because it’s not WordPress. You don’t need to set it up, you don’t need to bother with it. You get a website accepting credit cards and PayPal marketing tools, analytics. Like this is something instead of using WordPress. If you have WordPress, I wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot pole. You’re just paying for stuff you don’t need and that duplicates.
[00:45:47.560] – Jonathan Denwood
What you’ve got is interesting. I don’t know where their pitching is really, because we haven’t touched the one area we haven’t touched and I done it intentionally because I really didn’t want to confuse people is we’re not talking about the SAS membership providers. Some of them provide videos, some of them don’t like Kajabi. I think they’re in partnership with Visia. Visia that actually provides the video for the Kajabi, or they used to. But I think that’s still the fact.
[00:46:29.230] – Spencer Foreman
No, I mean this is really simple. You can tell what they do by going to the Examples tab. This is for somebody whose primary business is making video content, either entertainment or education. And you don’t want to bother with making a membership website with access control and all the stuff that we do very routinely. Instead you want to just say like, I want to host my video stuff and have people pay me for it. And so much like the membership stuff with lessons in an LMS. This is like a video centric LMS with membership built in that you’re paying a service fee for. And I can see we’re in the world of people who just focus on making videos. Like I’m a YouTube person, but I want to do this. I can see why this would be attractive. However, we all know that even YouTube has gotten into the pay for access to your content game. So now on YouTube they have a built in we didn’t discuss it, but they have a built in monetization option where you can charge people to subscribe to your content and it’s got a certain level of protection over it.
[00:47:32.040] – Spencer Foreman
So I mean, this is an interesting compilation of features, but I just clarified by saying you wouldn’t use this if you had WordPress.
[00:47:41.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Let’s go on to another one. Video.
[00:47:55.050] – Spencer Foreman
They’ve been around forever as well. They’re old school also.
[00:47:58.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they are. Looked at this a year ago. I think there’s been a lot of movement around this. They all seem to be kind of gunning for vimeo a bit more than they used to because they used to apart from the last one we’re going to be talking about. But that’s also they are kind of getting a bit more competitive in this area. Would you agree with that?
[00:48:27.750] – Spencer Foreman
Yeah, I mean, I was listening to a show. Jason Calcan is a show I like to listen to as well, because there’s a certain effect when you’ve got venture backed companies or somebody who’s been around for a while, they all start to look like each other because over time, you start to realize the product market fit for the pain. Point you’re solving is essentially this, that, and the other feature. So over time, you’ve got the Coke versus Pepsi versus Mountain Dew or whatever, wars, because it’s basically the same thing. It’s just my branding and marketing and my personal relationship that differentiate the same solution that we’re both offering. At the end of the day, the things that they’re offering and the price point are going to look exactly like their competitors at this point. Like a vimeo, because that’s what people are essentially looking for after all these years. TADA and, you know, they offer a.
[00:49:24.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Free plan, but it’s got this critic is crippled like the other ones, like 25 inches. But the next plan up the pro $19 paid annually. Or or you can pay monthly 29 or 19 if you pay annually per month, $228. And it’s unlimited videos.
[00:49:45.870] – Spencer Foreman
But that’s like vimeo. I mean, Vimeo, I believe, is the same way. And certainly bunny net, the unlimited videos is a fool’s errand because, like, go back to what we’re just talking about with the bunny net over the course of all of the customers. Well, I’m going to tell a secret here that I don’t know if I should tell, but, like, I don’t think please do. If you use Zoom as I do, or you use Loom or any of those other services, dropbox box net, they all are using in some way or another bulk storage, like, let’s just say it’s Amazon AWS or something comparable. The API method for storing and retrieving content is such that they tell you there’s a storage limit, but they cannot take your stuff and get rid of it because it’s like a gigantic swimming pool and everybody’s stuff has a tag and it’s thrown into the pool. It would be cost prohibitive for them to manage finding your content and removing it from the pool. It’s cheaper to just keep making the pool bigger. Okay, so what happens is with, like, Zoom, zoom says you have five gigabyte limit on your stored videos.
[00:51:03.610] – Spencer Foreman
You have 185gb right now. Please delete it. And every month it’s like, no, really, please delete it.
[00:51:09.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Really, please be nice to us. We’re a Bolty international enterprise with about $3,003,000,000,000.
[00:51:17.800] – Spencer Foreman
But please, we thank you because of the same things. Like with the hosting services we talked about, like Netflix and whatever, they’ve realized, look, we know you and 800 people are using your login, but it’s easier for us to just sort of say, people here, they have realized, and I appreciate the Candidness unlimited Schmunlin Limited. It’s like it doesn’t really cost them more to let you just think of that as a benefit because most people don’t have that much stuff to put in there and those that leave their stuff laying around, it’s inconsequential cost to them to leave it. So it’s actually, in my opinion, being more transparent and honest. And I’ll relate this back to hosting one of my beefs with WP Engine just to pick a fight that I’ve talked about, please.
[00:52:05.930] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re nice to be with a full.
[00:52:08.570] – Spencer Foreman
Atwood, not anything that we haven’t talked about. They have an arbitrary limit on certain things. Right. Including your number of page views and your storage, which is so untrue in terms of their cost structure. It’s like let’s push you there. Like when the cell phone companies would charge you.
[00:52:30.710] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to be careful. I can get him upset. Listeners of views if I get too nasty about this.
[00:52:37.430] – Spencer Foreman
This is just factually true. So I’m saying is it’s very good for all of us when companies start to adapt marketing around honest metrics. And so we should all just be fair and honest when it comes to all of the video companies today. Getting back to video, there is a tangible cost to the storage that you use and to some extent there is a cost, a toll for the bandwidth being used, but there’s no cost to them like, yeah, you are right. Or anything else.
[00:53:10.530] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re just trying to use kind of Quaise our official pricing levels. They’re just attempting to explain it to non, less sophisticated individuals like you. So let’s go on to the next.
[00:53:28.720] – Spencer Foreman
Well, I don’t think you need to resort to add hominum attacks because you know where that’s going to go when you start.
[00:53:36.470] – Jonathan Denwood
To you.
[00:53:39.110] – Spencer Foreman
I’m giving you.
[00:53:40.330] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you call me older a guy?
[00:53:41.960] – Spencer Foreman
Because that really soccer. It’s World Cup time. That’s a yellow flag. I’m just wondering you one more attack and we’re going to have like three episodes.
[00:53:59.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, God, he got the wool onto the next one. Sprout PTO. I just love their marketing PTO. I was tempted to try and get a job. They have this really fantastic marketing videos where their team dress up as superheroes and I’m just tempted to try and become part of the team so I can wear one of the costumes. Sorry. I think they were aimed at the real business, but looking at the pricing, I haven’t used it. But I just wondering what your it seems to be getting quite a nice package, actually. What do you think?
[00:54:51.170] – Spencer Foreman
They’re covering all the same basis. Listen, there’s lots of hosting companies that are friends of ours and are doing really similar stuff to other hosting companies, but just doing it slightly different. Like our friend tomorrow, anybody by the.
[00:55:11.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Way, Tom loves me, but if you listen to Love you, anybody with good.
[00:55:17.610] – Spencer Foreman
Bling and a good relationship interest, look me up because basically Convicio’s example is there’s lots of specialties you could focus on. They focus on speed and scaling and security elements for certain types of customers. So I would say Sprout video is in the field kind of like a metaphor of convicio versus what WP engine is doing. It’s like they’re being specialized in certain aspects of certain features, but they’re really going to start to look a lot alike when you have other companies in those same features and aspects. I haven’t used this. I didn’t honestly know about Sprout video until this morning. But from looking at their website, it’s easy for me to see that they’re competing on the same kind of parameters.
[00:56:01.410] – Jonathan Denwood
The same I looked at them about a year ago and they were kind of more business-focused. They’re now getting into the same territory as the quasar consumer. Consumers, not business. I mean enterprise. They were more focused at the enterprise level. They’re now encroaching on business-to-business, consumer-to-business, that kind of area. But they’ve been around the donkey. They’ve been around for a long time. They’re from New York.
[00:56:37.810] – Spencer Foreman
Here’s what I can tell you. I like about whatever they got. They’re being real and they’re being transparent about their origin story. I would have liked to see it on their home page, like who the founder was. Because, for example, one of the best things that Wistia did in the early days was Chris and Brennan were along with many of the early team members, they were just in all of the videos, their faces and their names. Like, even to this day, it’s other people on the team. But like, Wistia has like real I call them kids because they’re in their twenty s and thirty s. But real people like little kids. Those kids get off from my radio server. But I’m saying on Sprout, they’re being clever. I like how they’re being campy and.
[00:57:19.490] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s real, and you know, yeah, you’re right, though. But you don’t know who. I suppose you can find out pretty quickly, but it’s not on the web, but it’s just their promotional. I want to be part of the team, so I can wear the Power costume. If you watch the video, they got one. He’s got Rocket Man. I want to become Rocket Man. Spencer sometimes wants to put a rocket up our backside, but there we go.
[00:57:46.550] – Spencer Foreman
I want to say that this is just a general thing about anybody who’s making a video site. Part of the success of Wistia, which I think they’re emulating in their own way, is similar to other brands that we’ve seen that had viral success, like Dollar Shave Club. Right. The videos and stuff for Dollar Shave Club became emulated by a lot of people because they were very funny and campy, and different. They didn’t have a lot to do with the product as much as they had to do with getting your attention. And at the same point, the founder was in the videos. I think that that’s the best and easiest way for any small company or even a small enterprise to get success is to make people understand there’s a real relationship with real people underneath what’s going on versus the sterile, corporate, like, I don’t know, my hosting is going on in some cave somewhere, and I don’t know who’s in charge of it. Because with Wistia, for example, you knew who was in charge of it with this company. You might not see the names, but at least you get the idea it’s a small company in New York.
[00:58:45.440] – Spencer Foreman
There’s somebody who’ll answer the phone, I’m sure. And that’s a reassuring thing if you’re not really at the late stages of your career.
[00:58:53.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’re going to wrap it up. Getting close to an hour. So Spencer, what’s the best way for people I’ve managed only to get a yellow card. I haven’t managed to get the school yellow rate I pulled out.
[00:59:07.730] – Spencer Foreman
You had a personal file. Actually, in hockey metaphor, that was a cross-check. You got ejected in the third period, but at least the game continued. You didn’t lose the game this time.
[00:59:21.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you. I’m so worried about that. Spencer, what’s the best way for people to find out more and what do you offer?
[00:59:29.610] – Spencer Foreman
I have tried to make it as easy as possible. So Spencerformen.com. Spencerforman.com. I would like everybody to join the free newsletter at the top because I post regularly on Twitter and LinkedIn, and I also have the kind of content that crosses over membership, marketing, automation, eCommerce, sales funnels, and freelance even. And so a lot of the things we talked about here, I like to share the latest and the greatest in an easy-to-consume fashion. So you don’t have to spend a ton of time dragging through stuff. So please join the list. I won’t spam you, but I will get you the facts and the data you need for whatever you’re up to as a freelancer or an agent.
[01:00:10.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Agency spent. Sign up. Spencer will send you. Spencer Fax. So there we go. Rob Wicked. Give me a look.
[01:00:20.790] – Spencer Foreman
Rob.
[01:00:21.470] – Jonathan Denwood
So I keep I have a very.
[01:00:24.090] – Spencer Foreman
Long memory, by the way.
[01:00:26.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Keep going, keep going. We’re going to wrap it up there, folks. Folks are listening. You’ve got any questions? Also, join us live; we love people. Join us live at 830 Pacific Standard Time on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Or you can join the membership machine Facebook group. Join us there. You can watch the show live, and you can ask us some questions, which we will answer after the podcast part of the show. That would be great. We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon. Fake expire.
[01:01:05.370] – Ending
Thanks for listening to the Membership Machine show. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes, and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.
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