Free cloud storage is widely available. After the Dropbox hype really kicked in other providers soon followed with free cloud storage services. It was maybe one year ago I tried some of them to use in a HTML5 audio player. Back then almost no provider allowed direct public links with the ability to stream. Last week I did another round and tried which services allow users to stream video directly from the free cloud storage services and what their limits are. Of course, both Youtube and Vimeo are great but sometimes content isn’t allowed or you want to use your own player with custom functionality.

The list below shows a list of free cloud storage services, limits are not always clear but I think every service will shut you down eventually if you start to generate serious amounts of traffic.

streaming video
YES
YES
YES
YES
Free storage
5GB
5GB
2GB
5GB
Maximum file size
2GB
5GB
2GB (300MB via web upload)
4GB
Bandwith limit
unknown
unknown
10GB (free)/250GB (paid)
none
streaming video
no
no
no
no
no
no
Free storage
25GB
1GB
50GB
5GB
10GB
50GB
Maximum file size
50MB
1GB
2GB
500MB
unknown
25MB
Bandwith limit
unknown
none
1TB
500MB per day
unknown
10GB per month

Demo (using Ubuntu One):