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Here's some links to better quality versions of the video.

Part 1
Part 2

Here's some links to better quality versions of the video.

Part 1
Part 2

I don't have a tv, nor do I want one, but every now and then I want to flake out to some non-interactive entertainment. Here are the sites I've found for free tv and video on the web (that I can remember at 1:48 a.m.)

http://edition.cnn.com/ -News fix

http://www.homestarrunner.com/toons.html -Not tv or video per se, but strongbad email flash animations are a hoot and close enough

http://tv.yahoo.com/feature/supernatural.html -The show Supernatural online, although I haven't watched it yet. Featured on /.

http://www.atomfilms.com/ -Everybody knows this one; marginally good

http://video.freevideoblog.com/ -Alot of crap, the odd good video

http://video.google.com/ -Random

http://www.ifilm.com/ -See also atomfilms

http://www.newgrounds.com/ -Way cool, homepage worthy!

http://tv.reuters.com/ - more news video than cnn

http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog - ???, Profit! Actually, I don't know what to say

http://portal.omroep.nl/uitzendinggemist/ -Dutch TV up the wazoo

http://mediahopper.com/portal.htm -1041 tv stations from all over the world listed and ready to watch (as far as I can tell)

http://video.search.yahoo.com/ -Stuff n' things

http://www.youtube.com/ -People upload and share their videos online... you've been warned!

I should add everything here is "family friendly", as far as I'm aware: no porn, uberviolence or gratuitous advertising (if I've somehow overlooked something, I apologise).

FWIW I'm one the co-founders of http://vidiac.com/ Mentioned above by "lukewarmfusion", and yes we do offer a similar service, though we specialize in offering free video hosting branded under your website, and then let web site owners decide what sort of video content they want their portal to specialize in.

I'll answer what questions I can that I've seen posted here.

1.) Does advertising pay the bills? Yes, but it's very low margin unlike picture hosting and the like. There are many ways to make a living on this, from syndicating the best content to providing pay-per view for high end content. Our goal though will be to be able and pay back the content creators for their submissions "leveling the playing field" and allowing indie artist to make a living creating quality content.

2.) Why Flash player? We're using Windows Media and are preparing to launch a Flash option. We're finding that the 20% of the population Windows Media doesn't reach is covered by Flash. There are no elegant solutions out there. I've seen some good Javaplayers like on2, but the problem becomes that sites like MySpace and Xanga limit their user's ability to post Java making embedding videos difficult. Our solution will be to offer both and let users pick what works for them. Real and Quicktime have their own pros and cons as well, but right now the most ubiquitous player is Flash7. With 15,000 videos submitted to our system since February though it's expensive to diversify into more than two formats (transcode time and storage)

Right now we stand on an interesting convergence of cheap video editing software, inexpensive video recorders, cheap hard drive space and bandwidth that is starting to become affordable. I think you will see many new Video hosting portals cropping up in the comming year. Our Software is an "ASP-hosted" software solution that lets you create your own portal for your web site, and not to brag on ourselves too much, it's been a huge success. We're now streaming 370K videos a day to 50K people across 30 sites using our solution.

Like any new communication format, it will go through it's trials and tribulations in the coming year, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of garbage, but I think we'll also see a lot of good come out of it. My Favorite example of that is Anthony Carlone who is Video-Blogging xBox games. He's very young, and right now his reviews are rough, but who's to say that he won't turn into his own "G4-television" channel in the future?
http://xboxcountry.freevideoblog.com/

Anyhow I'm just happy that I'm playing some part of this, and every day I find it neat to see how our software is being used.

Adam Bruce
Vidiac.com

I launched my video hosting website http://videos.streetfire.net/ for hosting car videos and sister site http://video.freevideoblog.com/ for everything else, 4 months ago. In those 4 months we have swelled to 300K videos streamed a day proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt...... That American Infomerical-TV sucks and that kids with DV cameras can create more entertaining content than than TV production studios looking for the next ad sponsored show. (i.e. Pontiac Solstice "Aprentice" or "Batman Begins" NASCAR 400).....of course the bitter irony is that in order to support this service we use banner ads, so maybe we're no better afterall.....ahh sweet irony. making hypocrits of us all

In the next few years I think we're going to see some serious changes to the Television big-media business model. Much in the way Napster was distruptive to the music industry, Bit Torrent and the like will be disruptive to TV entertainment in how shows are piloted, selected and funded

Just my humble experience

-Adam

This reminds me a lot of a problem my company is facing. One of partner sites that uses our free video hosting software http://video.freevideoblog.com/ gets a lot of "fan" dedications to popular TV shows like Buffy the Vampire slayer or Anime music videos set to popular songs. It's damn good work, and IMOHO only creates more awareness and popularity to the original work, but because we're paranoid of getting sued by the RIAA and MPAA, we have to delete those videos from the system.

I have to wonder how the Music industry gets around this as often I hear music that "samples" tracks from other artists, or even sound bites from TV and the movies. So I know there is a process in place to take an original work and modify it (And combine it with your own original work) to create your own unique art...but I don't know what it is, or where that shade of gray turns black.

I have to say that in this lawsuit happy time I'm more inclined to ere on the side of caution, but I feel a lot of unique and original work is lost or covered up by folks like myself moderating content off the system.

Anyhow just some idle rambling from my own experience.

-Adam

The P tag sucks because it's redundant and the new P tag standard agrees with me. It makes more sense to say "New Line" instead of "Stop Paragraph""Start Paragraph". Obviously if you need a new Paragraph then the old one has ended.

Also if you need to scootch your text down just a smidge, it's easier to just drop in a BR than dig into the CSS.

As for my HTML skill level, it rises to the needs of the project and I have yet to see an end-user affecting need that requires a drive to newer standards. It makes more sense to write code in the most backward compatible spec that gets the job done.

As for how I handle Content Management, http://videos.streetfire.net/ is an HTML skin with .NET objects embeded as needed by the Nav state. The main page uses 13 nested objects to be built and at ~200 concurrent users we rarely see CPU utilization go above 4%. (and that's because we're running 5 domains being dynamicly skinned real time with App and DB servers running on the same pipe). We use HTML instead XHTML because Site Owners can upload an HTML template with a Tag that says "insert video player" and the server builds the page dynamicly from there.

http://video.freevideoblog.com/ is running the same objects and the same server with different content and a different skin. We scratch built the CMS/VMS (video Managment System?) to allow N number of skinned video portals. Go to http://www.vidiac.com/ if you want more overview.

Okay this pisses me off, the "Benign Giant" yet again kills another one of my fledgling companies.

Last year I started a company to offer people and business free 1GB email and 2GB File Sharing... within a month of use debuting, Google anounces GMAIL. The writing was on the wall they had buzz, and name, we had nothing. I would literally see people say "Anyone have a good webmail account?" I'd post "feel free to use mine 1GB mail and 2GB file/photo sharing" Next post down someone would say "I have 6 GMAIL invites" and my post would be ignored.

Okay so we canned that (software we had spent 4 years developing) went back tot he drawing board and made it into a video sharing service you can add to your website. (That is point CNAME.yourwebsite.com to our server and we skin your site with our video portal).

For Example:
http://videos.streetfire.net/
http://video.freevideoblog.com/

We debuted this in February and in 6 weeks we went from 500 visitors a day to 25,000 and 55,000 videos served a day. 30% week to week growth. Finally we had something that people wanted and was growing fast.

Now Google launches free video hosting and yet again I'm screwed. Do they have my phones tapped or something?

Next I'm going to launch a free Potatoe Gun building service just to see how Google destroys that business too.

GOOGLE I HATE YOU!!!!

-Adam, destitute programmer watching a big company destroy my livelyhood...again.