Where to put your acting reel

Almost every reel problem is a hosting problem, not an editing problem. The reel is fine. It will not play on the casting director's phone, or it opens on a page surrounded by other actors, or the link went dead when the file was replaced. Those are all decisions about where it lives, and they are all reversible in an afternoon.

Do not host the video file yourself

Putting an mp4 on your own web hosting and linking to it is the single most common mistake, and it fails in the least visible way. There is no adaptive quality, so someone on a train gets a stalled loading circle rather than a lower resolution. There is no reliable seeking. It costs you bandwidth every time it is opened, and on cheap hosting it will be throttled exactly when several people watch it at once, which is to say the week after something good happens.

Upload it to a video service and embed the player. That is what those services are for and both of the reasonable ones are free at the level you need.

YouTube or Vimeo

Both are fine. They are good at different things and the choice is genuinely down to which of these you care about:

If you only want one sentence: use YouTube if you want to be found, Vimeo if you want to keep changing the cut without reissuing the link. Plenty of actors do both, with the reel public on YouTube and a private cut on Vimeo for submissions.

Send them to your page, not the video

Wherever the file lives, the link you actually give out should be on your own site.

The difference is what surrounds the player. On a bare video page there is the reel and nothing else, and when it ends the visitor is finished with you. On your own page the reel sits next to your name, your credits, your headshots and your representation, and someone who liked what they saw has somewhere to go next. That is the entire argument for having a website at all, and the reel is where it pays off most obviously.

It also means the link on your resume is yours. If you change host, or recut, or take something down, the address people already have keeps working.

The two defaults that undo all of it

1. Autoplay. A reel that starts talking the moment a page opens is opened in an office, on a train, in a room with other people. The reaction is to close the tab, not to turn the volume down. Let them press play.
2. Suggested videos at the end. An embedded YouTube player will, by default, finish your reel by offering other actors. This is fixable with a player setting and most people never look. Check what yours does after the last frame.

More than one reel

One reel is right for most people starting out. Separate reels start earning their keep when your range genuinely splits, most often drama against comedy, or when you have a body of work in a format that is its own conversation, such as commercial or voice. A voice reel is a different job again, and lives on a page of its own.

If you do have several, label them plainly and put the strongest first. "Drama reel" and "Comedy reel" are better labels than "Reel 1" and "Reel 2", and far better than a date. Nobody wants to audit your filmography to work out which one to watch.

Test it the way it will be opened

Before the link goes anywhere, open it on a phone, on mobile data, while logged out of everything. That is how it will be received, and it is exactly the condition under which unlisted and private settings fail. A reel that plays perfectly on your laptop and asks a casting director to sign in is worse than no reel, because they will not write back to tell you.

1. Open the link on a phone, not a laptop.
2. Do it logged out, or in a private window.
3. Turn the wifi off first so it is running on mobile data.
4. Watch the last five seconds and see what appears after them.