In the wake of the purchase of YouTube by Google, there has been a lot of discussion about online video and the various companies trying to gain market share in the space.  When you look at the various players, you’ll see a lot of different approaches.  Some focus on viral video.  Some focus on sharing videos with friends and family.  Some focus on serving the needs of video bloggers.

As someone who builds websites for a living, I’ve been looking at these services the last few weeks.  What I’ve been contemplating is using these services to host videos for some of our clients. 

We’ve built custom Flash video players for a number of clients and we will continue to do so for those who want or need a custom player.  But for clients that produce four of five videos a year, why not host the video using one of these third party services? 

You save time since all the services automatically convert videos into FLV (Flash) format for you.  You save bandwidth costs by hosting through a third party.  You also get a lot of value-added features that you aren’t going to have the resources to build into a custom player yourself.

We launched a website for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation earlier this week that includes a few videos.  After looking at four or five options, I ended up hosting the videos through blip.tv.  Here’s what I like about the service and why I chose it.

(1) It gives you total control over how others can legally use your video.  You can reserve all rights for yourself or allow others to use your video through a variety of Creative Commons licenses.  This is of vital importance when you are doing with professionally produced video.  Folks should read the Terms of Service before posting material to YouTube.

(2) The blip.tv player is very subtle in its design and doesn’t include giant, obnoxious blip.tv logos everywhere (see video at bottom of the page).  This is important when your goal is to brand a company or organization.  You don’t want your video players brand competing with that of the website itself.

(3) blip.tv has all the features you’d expect in an online video service (see an example here).  It produces code you can share with site visitors so they can post the video to their own website and blogs.  Videos can be viewed in a variety of different formats (flv, mov, wmv, mp4, etc.).  You can upload a screen grab from the video that can serve as a play prompt.  They make it easy to post videos to your blog.  blip.tv produces an RSS feeds of your video for you.  It had all the options I wanted or could think of really. 

(4) It works, which is the most important thing ultimately.  The upload process is straight forward.  The hosting is of high quality.  There really aren’t any problems to report here.

I’m probably not using blip.tv the way it was  intended.  The company is focused on serving the needs of video bloggers who want to insert ads in their videos as a way of making money for themselves and blip.tv.  Regardless, I think it is a great option for web developers looking for a slick and economically way to host their videos.

You can see videos hosted by blip.tv on the Washington Area Women’s Foundation website.  Below is an example of a blip.tv hosted video.