Overview of Bolt:
Bolt is a straightforward free video sharing website where you can upload videos, photos, music or even keep a blog.
Cost of Bolt:
Free
Terms of Service for Bolt:
Bolt does not allow any content that is obscene, harmful, illegal, copyrighted, etc. Also, no stalking, impersonation, or spamming of any kind is allowed.
When you upload to Bolt, you keep the rights to your content.
However, Bolt reserves the right to do whatever they want to your audio, video, graphics or photos as long as they are uploaded to the site. Bolt retains the right to use any other kind of content you create (i.e. blogs) even after you take it off the site.
Sign-up Procedure for Bolt:
Bolt asks for a username and password as well as your email and birthday. After signup you get taken directly to a page where you can find your friends who are already on Bolt. The menu bar at the top has an upload button that will take you right to the video uploader.
Uploading to Bolt:
On the upload page, you choose between uploading video, photos, or a blog. For video, you're taken to a page where you can upload from your computer or from a webcam.
To upload a file from your computer, enter a title, a category, and tags, and a description if you want.
Your video must be under 100MB in .flv, .mov, .wmv, .avi, .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .3gp, .3g2, or .asf format. If you have upload problems, make sure it is 320x240 dpi, or smaller.
Bolt displays an upload bar that tells you how many MB out of your total file size has loaded. It is quite slow; my 80MB file took more than half an hour to upload.
Compression on Bolt:
Bolt converts your video to Flash format, so some quality will be lost Also, bear in mind that the conversion can take up to an hour on top of the upload. You do not have to have your browser open for the conversion, however.
Tagging on Bolt:
Bolt requires that you add tags to your video. It does not ask you to separate your tags with commas like most other video sharing sites; simply leave spaces between them, or use quotes to group multiword tags together.
Viewability on Bolt:
Videos uploaded to Bolt have that pixilated YouTube look, probably as a result of the conversion to Flash, and they take a long time to load when you go to view them. Not especially impressive, but at least the motion in the videos is smooth, without a lot of jerks.
Additional Features on Bolt:
Once your video uploads, you are taken to a profile page. Here you can choose a thumbnail for your video (they provide some frames from the video to choose from, or you can upload one from your computer); you can also add the video to an album, the way you can with photos on many websites. Here you can also add information about yourself, including a photo, and edit the look of your profile.
Sharing From Bolt:
To share a Bolt video, you can copy and paste the HTML code labeled “Embed” to the right of the player, or use the URL provided underneath to link to the video.
Bolt will post your video directly to Digg or Myspace if you click these links just above the HTML code. Bolt asks for your login info and posts the video for you.
You can also click “Email to a friend” and a link will be sent to the email addresses you provide.