Free Private Online Video Sharing – What are Your Choices?

We’ve probably all used YouTube at one time or another. My only problem with YouTube is the lack of privacy. I enjoy sending out video invitations for our annual Halloween party, but don’t want to invite 15,000,000 people.

Sure YouTube is free, but have you ever attempted to make a video private? It’s nearly impossible to figure out and then even if you do, it’s hard to get people to actually view it that way.

Here’s the scenario:

Your uncle shot your wedding video and your friends sent you all their photos from the event. You just had your DIY wedding video edited and want to share it with your family and friends – and only them. The example below is hosted on YouTube for bandwidth considerations.

Here’s a rundown of some companies, other than YouTube, that allow free online video sharing with the following criterion:

1. Free – really free
2. Ability to easily set the videos for private viewing only 
3. No software to download – there were other websites out there which met the first two criterion, but then required unique software to upload video (something I try to avoid whenever possible).
4. No need for your guests to sign up with the service in order to view your videos – think how annoying Snapfish is for doing that.

Photobucket allows up to 1GB of storage for free. This can be photos or video. Video must  be less than 5 minutes and 100 MB.

Your account will be public by default, but this can easily be changed in your account settings. You assign a password for your guests. They can then view your videos without needing a Photobucket account.

Flickr limits your video files to 90 seconds in length, 150 MB. You can upload 2 per month with a free account.

Motionbox allows 750 MB of video storage for free. Your file size is limited to 300MB with the free account. Movies are easily shared with your family and friends. No additional software is needed to upload video, although it is available.

Our sample video is 45 seconds; 87 MB. If you had a 10 minute video, you would most likely be limited to using YouTube and navigating their clear-as-mud privacy settings.

Any longer than 10 minutes and you’ll have problems finding a site to host it. Although, any longer than 10 minutes, you’ll also have issues getting anyone other than your mother to watch the whole thing.

If you don’t care about your videos being private, YouTube is by far the simplest option. If you don’t mind downloading software, your options for private video sharing go up, but not significantly.

If you know of another alternative which meets the above 4 criterion please post it to our comments.