I'd like to inquire as to the overall opinions regarding the SEO benefit of hosting your own videos.
Specifically, if you can host your own viral video (or extremely useful video resource, as it were) you could garner all the potential backlinks relating to that video. If you hosted your video on Youtube or Vimeo, all backlinks potentially would go to that domain.
Has anyone considered this in their reasoning?

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, with the exception of the uncontrollable automatic and low bitrate encoding that you get - which itself might well be a deal breaker depending on the content.

For us, it has been almost a year now hosting videos on YouTube. I cannot comment on the bitrate encoding as we don't see any quality and/or delivery issues for the most part. There is the occasional visitor who encounters challenges but they are few and far between. We do a lot of HD too.

The real issue is how it's perceived by your audience, with the ubiquitous YouTube Flash interface and the logo overlay.

Do you think it really matters to the "general audience"? I mean, they are there watching a video, its content is what attracts them, not the YouTube Flash interface and/or logo. The YouTube logo is unobtrusive and for a free product, it is worth the few challenges one may be faced with depending on the audience. I don't see any issues with embedded YouTube videos on websites - its the content of the video I'm there for and that is what counts.

YouTube is still the land of silly kittens and amateur jackass imitators, embedded on every 15 year old's blog the web over.

I can't say that I visit too many 15 year old's blogs. If that were the case, then I can understand your point of view.

Your choice if you want to be associated with that. I would suggest that Vimeo or other options, with semi-pro paid options, would be a better choice for anything commercial.

I have no qualms with the other providers in this space. I've watched quite a few Vimeo videos also, but nowhere near as many as YouTube.

Since when did being associated with YouTube become a bad thing? :( Does the visitor really pay that much attention to the player itself?

Specifically, if you can host your own viral video (or extremely useful video resource, as it were) you could garner all the potential backlinks relating to that video.

Yes, you could. But, from a business standpoint, do you really have the backbone to support that type of bandwidth moving forward? For many, hosting 10, 15, 20 videos on YouTube is a perfect opportunity to get their content out there and noticed.

If you hosted your video on Youtube or Vimeo, all backlinks potentially would go to that domain.

Diversification. YouTube and Vimeo both provide a global audience. Its another outlet to diversify your media profile. Sure, you can host your own videos, you can also host those 15 minute clips on YouTube and gain additional exposure. I've found that having a YouTube Channel with the right content works very well for the client. You have quite a bit of control over your Channel(s), their content along with the look and feel, at the YouTube level. And then you have all sorts of embedding options including HD.

Your points are well made, pageoneresults, and I agree with what you've said.
However, my point is, from an SEO perspective, if you can get some stupid video to get 100,000 views on youtube, it won't have that much of a benefit to your SEO, branding (unless of course the stupid viral video is somehow branded, which is of course possible), or overall website traffic (for those that are CPM minded)... Sure, people might go to your site after seeing the video (although probably not), and they might link to your site (although why do that when they are trying to share your video, they would just link to youtube)..

We all know that we can't compete with Vimeo or Youtube, however a targeted effort at hosting specific videos on your domain, and aggressively promoting it, could have a huge benefit to your sites backlink profile, and social media presence (such a benefit, I would assume, would be exponentially less if it was hosted elsewhere).
Or I could be completely wrong :)

I put my video on Youtube, figuring that it would be more likely to be viewed (and thus the link to my site seen), and would be more likely to rank for a couple of phrases. It's getting views, and it does rank well for those phrases.

However, it's not doing my site any good, really. I have the better-quality, unmodified video on my site, and it gets a few dozen views a day.

All in all, the time spent on that video probably would have been better spent getting old-fashioned links.

If I'm going to do another video, it will have to be something unique enough and of sufficient interest to justify the time and effort.

But I thought you hosted the video on YouTube and then played it on your own site.

Certainly that is what I was planning to do... is that not what people do?

I have one version of the video on YouTube with the hope that it will rank on Google for one or two phrases.

I have a better quality version, slightly modified, that's on Amazon's servers but is linked to from my site.

The real issue is how it's perceived by your audience, with the ubiquitous YouTube Flash interface and the logo overlay. YouTube is still the land of silly kittens and amateur jackass imitators, embedded on every 15 year old's blog the web over. Your choice if you want to be associated with that. I would suggest that Vimeo or other options, with semi-pro paid options, would be a better choice for anything commercial.

I agree, YouTube is good for starting out and testing the waters, but many businesses probably require a more "personalized" solution. Agree again on the point that there are many other free hosting, or less than $10/month hosting solutions that don't show the logo, don't require that your videos be made available to the general public, and don't pop up ads.

After reading all the benefits of hosting a video on another site I haven't seen anyone mention the benefit of hosting your own video. If you put it on your own site/server then YOU get the SEO/ranking/linking benefit of having a video on your site. Otherwise the other site gets all the benefit.

Am I missing something here?

Am I missing something here?

You get traffic and SEO benefits by embedding a video hosted on another site too. A real advantage of YouTube is that you can get some additional search traffic from youtube itself and from google's indexing of that video.

I'm not sure that the search engine cares where the video is hosted as far as your page SERPs are concerned. In this case you should look at it the same way as if you display an image on your page that is stored on another server.

The added problem is that if you have a lot of traffic to your page, and must deliver many simultaneous streams, your users may not have a good experience playing back streaming video unless you have a video server installed on your webserver.