Video Hosting & YouTube Channels
Hosting videos on an official School of Medicine channel means more exposure to your videos – and less work for you.
You put a lot of effort into producing your videos. And when you’re finished, you may not know where to host them.
Resist the temptation to create a new YouTube or Vimeo account. Creating a group-specific account can be counter-productive and create more work for you. It means your content will be siloed from related videos produced at the School of Medicine. It also means you’ll have to regularly post new videos to keep your account from going stale.
A simpler solution is to host your videos on an official School of Medicine YouTube channel. Videos hosted on these channels can easily be promoted on the school’s official accounts, discovered in search engine results and embedded on websites.
We have two official channels, depending on the audience and content of the video:
School of Medicine
Research, education, or the full School of Medicine mission
Contact WashU Medicine Marketing & Communications to add a video, or if you have any questions.
Washington University Physicians
Patient care, patient education and clinical procedures
Contact Erin Eveker (evekere@wustl.edu) in the Faculty Practice Plan to add a video.
Interested in learning more?
Below we’ve answered a few common questions about hosting videos on our YouTube channels. If you have any questions or need a hand, please get in touch.
Like other social media channels, accounts on Vimeo and YouTube take time to maintain. Videos need to be uploaded frequently to keep the account from going stale, and vigilance regarding branding, compliance and usage is required.
When groups across the School of Medicine pool their videos into unified accounts, you don’t take on the risk of maintaining a separate account. Instead, you contribute to a centralized channel that has a greater number of videos and updates than is practically manageable on your own.
Consolidated School of Medicine accounts also make your videos more visible. Your videos will come up more frequently as related and suggested because they are connected to an account with lots of content.
Yes! We can create a separate page for your group’s videos by creating a playlist.
A playlist is a set of videos within a YouTube channel. For example, here’s our playlist for videos highlighting students.
Yes. In fact, the preferred method for including a video on your website is to upload it to YouTube, then embed it onto your site. This saves you from uploading the media file to your site directly, which can lead to hosting, loading and performance issues.
You can embed individual videos, or even an entire playlist.
Here’s how:
Yes. You can adjust a YouTube video’s privacy settings to control who may see it.
For example, videos that are “unlisted” are uploaded to a channel, but they are not listed on the channel’s page or included in search results. To see an unlisted video, viewers need the direct link, or they may view it on a website where it’s been embedded.
Just let us know if you have any privacy requirements when you send us your video.
YouTube is the School of Medicine’s recommended video-hosting site because of its popularity and longevity among the public, the prime position its videos are given in Google search results, and its flexibility to accommodate a wide range of videos in length, content and style.
YouTube also makes it relatively easy to achieve web accessibility standards.* That’s because YouTube automatically generates captions for all videos (the account owner can also easily edit and correct those captions). Other popular video hosting services require account owners to upload a separate, specialized file to caption videos.
Videos captions provide another major benefit: They make YouTube content readable and therefore searchable by Google and other search engines.
Furthermore, a single video hosted on YouTube can be cross-promoted, via playlists, among the official channels for the School of Medicine, Washington University Physicians and Washington University, which can further increase its exposure.
*Captions or transcripts are strongly recommended for all video and audio files on Washington University websites. Providing a text version of your video is required for compliance with accessibility standards, which are intended to make technology accessible to all users, regardless of disability status. Captions are also helpful for users who don’t speak English as a first language or are unable to listen to audio for technical or environmental reasons.
How do I add my videos to YouTube?
We have two official channels, depending on the audience and content of the video:
School of Medicine channel
Videos related to research, education, or the full School of Medicine mission
Contact WashU Medicine Marketing & Communications to add a video.
Washington University Physicians channel
Videos related to patient care, patient education and clinical procedures
Contact Erin Eveker (evekere@wustl.edu) in the Faculty Practice Plan to add a video.
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