Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the original video files back out of YouTube? Wouldn't it be great if you could just upload videos to YouTube and have them automatically appear in iTunes, correctly transcoded as needed?

Yes, I was as surprised as you when I went poking around the YouTube developer section and found no methods to get back the original video files or to do any of these other things I wish for.

I still like Revver's "bolt ads to your videos" business model, and AudioBlog is still my choice for the most flexible commercial service to easily input/host/etc. all your audio and video service (including direct-to-iTunes support).

But where are people putting videos in order to get an audience? YouTube, of course. Let the chorus of "YouTube sucks" begins...until someone else manages to make something that is as popular.

It seems that since the launch of Ourmedia, there are now dozens of places wanting to keep your videos online. You know, trying to be the "Flickr of Video" (aside: could Flickr itself start storing video? I think there are a lot of differences between static photos and video, but I'd love for that team to take a run at it...). Actually, the issue is bigger than just video -- in general, there is a lack of easy ways of both storing and downloading large user created files online. BitTorrent (plug: go get BitTorrent for Dummies, written by my friends Kris Krug and Susie Gardner) helps with download and bandwidth savings, but uploading and storage haven't really been solved. 10MB seems to be the magic number -- anything larger than that is difficult to deal with using a regular web upload, meaning you need to use an uploader application of some kind. In any case, this is was just meant to be a test post pointing to some personal videos. I completed my test of Revver, which uses a special uploader. I was wondering why my videos weren't showing up, and it turns out there is an extra step of actually bringing them public. This should probably be worked into the uploader at some point, but for now it makes the uploading process very simple. My public video page for Revver has all the clips I've uploaded (only two so far), both taken on my Canon S1 IS. Here's the thumbnail and click-through link for the heron video: