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:
I also have a video of seared beef on YouTube, but I wasn't happy with the quality of how it was transcoded. Revver seems to keep the original quality.
I haven't tried Google Video -- anyone have experiences to share there? It *seems* somewhat cumbersome with the whole approval process etc. I can understand this for for-pay video, but my main goal here is posting my own video content and making it easy to share with people, not to make money off it.
Yahoo doesn't have a video hosting option (am I missing something?), but instead has video search. What they want you to do is submit your MediaRSS feed (more info on MediaRSS here). Judging by Apple's success in getting people to adopt the iTunes RSS format, this is definitely an interesting direction to go. Of course, with the video iPod, who is to say that Apple and iTunes RSS might be the leader here for video as well.
Oh, and I can't forget the strangely named but very good AudioBlog.com -- which is/will be storing and transcoding video of up to 100MB in size. AudioBlog.com is the best solution that I know of right now if you want to retain control over your own audio and video content -- they just take care of all the hard bits like hosting and display, and you choose where to put it, without any advertising or third-party website where it lives. Note to self: activate full AudioBlog.com membership.
Update: Roland did a similar exercise and also concluded that AudioBlog is the best choice, but still lacking: it needs options for links to the source video (like it does for MP3s) to avoid the re-encoding problem that degrades quality.
Update 2: somehow, a bunch of people had the same idea about looking at video all at the same time; here's the TechCrunch review looking for the "Flickr of Video". It's missing AudioBlog.com, so expect some more noise about video over the coming weeks.