I run a self-hosted video site that has about 800 videos. It's been live since 2000 and is a PR5 with a nearly 10k backlinks or so. My site needs a redesign, and I've rebuilt it from scratch in Wordpress - now it has all of the functionality I want, especially in terms of SEO. I was thinking about putting every single video on Youtube, and embedding each video (from Youtube) on its individual page (on my site). The pages would have a description of each video. Do you think this is a good idea -- why, or why not? The biggest risk I see here is that if Youtube makes a major change at some point in the future, then I'm at their mercy. The biggest benefit is that it currently takes me about 15 minutes to upload one video in wordpress - from formatting, splicing, adding a watermark, uploading to FTP, typing in the correct path to that FTP area, adding the splash image, etc. I'm wasting too much time. I also think it would help my site (which is well branded) to get a lot more exposure as I currently do not have a "share this video" feature, nor can I afford the bandwidth to do it.
If u don't want your users to download the video and save it in there hard disk, then don't go for youtube. There are many softwares available , which can download videos from youtube and some very popular video sites, but can't do that with less known video sites.
Bingo - that alone would prevent me from doing something similar. Sure, you could save a few minutes now by linking to youtube, but think of all the time lost if youtube makes some serious changes.