The State of Video Streaming Technology

[nickyoung]

What is the current state of video streaming solutions on the web, and how will it change in the near future?
(I am referring to YouTube, Imeem, Vimeo, and the 1000 other fish in the sea.)

[nickyoung]

Here is the problem I think we face, and how I hope to see it change.

Many Video Format Options
We have literally 1000's of websites hosting their own video. Some of these are video hosting services, while others are privately stored and streamed. Videos come in a wide variety of players, sizes and quality encoding. Embed codes are sometimes included with videos, allowing users to share the video around the web. These embed codes are not really standardized other than that they use the html tags, primarily the <object> tag, to allow web-publishers quick copy paste html. Some of these embed codes can even be customized to change the appearance of the player, or the size and quality of the video. In short, there is no standard video format out there, and we have the choice to select publish and share formats that best fit our needs.

Separation of Design and Content
The whole move towards tableless layouts and external CSS as opposed to inline styles, describes the move towards separation of design and content. With things such as video embed codes, and BB Code, we are offering regular users a degree of control over how they choose to present their content. For this post, I use the Bold tag and line break many times. However, isn't that the same as mixing inline styles with content? It sure as hell is practical, but it seems to go against the grain. Is too much separation bad? Or can we not think outside the box enough with this BB Code and Video Embedding garbage.

Video Aggregation
Ok. So now that there is more than one well recognized major video hosting service out there, you have the need to aggregate all videos into one place, and make the list searchable. Let's take VodPod for example. A user uploads their video to YouTube, and not long after they can actually find it from VodPod's site. It's the same way Technorati works with aggregating blogs. RSS News feeds are great. Let's take aggregation further! The question here is how far can you go when altering the presentation of a video that was meant for embedding/sharing? If you can't change the container it is in, then it will not look very presentable on the website it's embedded into. It requires a degree of publishing awareness to know how your content will be presented by another website. This is where standards come into play - if you don't have them, then nothing will fit right.

Question
For video sharing/embedding I would love to see some more standards. Can anyone identify them?

[kgun]

Originally Posted by nickyoung

Question
For video sharing/embedding I would love to see some more standards. Can anyone identify them?

A natural place to start may be here: http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

Generally:

On the http://www.w3.org/ site search "video standards"

[nickyoung]

Originally Posted by kgun

A natural place to start may be here: W3C Synchronized Multimedia Home page

Generally:

On the World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards site search "video standards"

That's a great place to look for W3 level standards. I just spent an hour or so reading up on various things. Thanks!

EDIT: I am finding the W3 Workshop Minutes very interesting in particular.

[nickyoung]

Ok. I just ran into this thing called oEmbed. I'm a check this out more.

oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media - ReadWriteWeb