SmartVideo hosts your videos and plays them on your own website with no YouTube ads, branding, or related videos, and no ad-tracking code. You can customize the player colors to match your brand.
Why sites replace YouTube embeds with SmartVideo
- About half the page weight. In our October 2026 Lighthouse benchmark, a blog page with one SmartVideo player weighed about 800 KB, against 1,564 KB for the same page with a YouTube embed, and made fewer requests.
- No ad tracking. The YouTube embed in that benchmark loaded Google’s doubleclick.net ad-tracking domains. The SmartVideo player loaded no ad-tracking code.
- No related videos or YouTube branding. Viewers watch in your player, with no suggested videos or YouTube links pulling them off your site.
- No YouTube ads. SmartVideo doesn’t place ads on your videos.
See the full SmartVideo vs YouTube comparison for the side-by-side breakdown.
Related videos and ads on YouTube embeds
YouTube’s player documentation says you cannot disable related videos. Setting rel=0 only limits them to the same channel. The modestbranding parameter is also deprecated and no longer changes the player’s branding.
YouTube embeds can show ads: they follow the same ad settings as the video on YouTube.
SmartVideo plans
SmartVideo is a paid hosting service. Startup includes 10,000 views/month and 1 TB of storage; Growth includes 50,000 views/month and 3 TB; Pro includes 150,000 views/month and 5 TB. See current plans and pricing.
Moving your videos
For the best quality, upload your original video files to the SmartVideo Library and replace your YouTube embeds. If you no longer have the originals, you can download your own uploads from YouTube Studio, but YouTube limits those downloads to 720p or 360p. You can keep your YouTube channel and public videos alongside the SmartVideo versions on your website.
YouTube links as a source are best-effort and work intermittently because of YouTube’s download restrictions. Use file uploads rather than relying on automatic YouTube conversion.