www.dpingram.com

Here is a comprehensive list of video search and video sharing sites.

For more details, including whether or not you can upload videos, video editing capability, single-file size limit, time limit, pricing structure, privacy settings, software downloads, target audience, monetize…. View the detailed video search engine and video sharing sites competitive matrix.

This list is also available in a more dynamic form with ratings and editor’s picks at contentinople.

Internet users may have to help distribute online video clips to combat the growing costs delivering such content. That’s the conclusion of researchers at Microsoft who have studied how peer-to-peer networks could reduce costs for sites like YouTube that spend millions every month to make videos available over the web.

Cheng Huang and Jin Li from Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, US, worked with Keith Ross of Polytechnic University in New York, US. They used nine months’ worth of records from the MSN video site servers to work out how to reduce the costs of meeting around 60 million requests for clips every month.

“The current model is not really sustainable,” Ross told New Scientist, “Microsoft is certainly interested in the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies, where users distribute video amongst themselves.”

Video sharing sites currently pay for bandwidth on a “per bit” basis. So the more popular they are, they more they pay for bandwidth. Canadian researchers estimate that Google-owned YouTube pays out around 2 million US dollars a month distributing clips, in addition to other costs such as servers and staffing costs.

via New Scientist

I see that The Independent today is reporting that some of the largest broadband providers in the UK are threatening to "pull the plug" from the BBC's new iPlayer unless the corporation contributes to the cost of streaming its videos over the internet.

Its an interesting discussion when you consider that someone has to pick up the tab for the cost of transmission of all that data. ISPs have invested heavily in broadband infrastructure and need ways to recoup that investment, and more importantly to finance the new (and ongoing) investment to satisfy the increasing demand for capacity to service these new bandwidth heavy services. Without ongoing investment the infrastructure will start to buckle under the load, and service levels will suffer.

In addition to the real risk of service overload, there is the commercial driver that says 'if someone is making money by utilizing my services then I can charge them more', so these ISPs see BBC making commercial gain and think 'I'd like some of that'. Its only natural.

What will be interesting is how this pans out and how the infrastructure owners will find new commercial models to work with these new bandwidth-intensive service providers.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on world ecomonic growth trends forecast by economists like Geoffrey Sachs you’ll know that within a very short few years countries like China and South Korea will overtake the US in terms of economic growth and GDP. So it comes as no surpise that China is investing in broadband connectivity at an unprecedented rate (South Korea is already just about the most broadband connected country in the world with upwards of 90% coverage, and mostly the much faster fibre compared to the US’s mostly copper networks). It is now quite possible that China will pass the U.S. to become the largest broadband market in the world later this year.

here is an interesting set of stats and summary

Winchester Open Coffee Club, the informal networking event for internet and entrepreneurs, investors, and marketeers, held its first meeting this morning at Costa Coffee in Winchester.

More about Open Coffee Clubs Worldwide here.

We had six people turn up: Andrew Thompson (CRM consultant at IBM), Marc Lyne (CEO, izimi), Curtis Nash (Gresham Computing, Compliant Phones Ltd), Philip Murphy and Philip Rudland, and me. It was a small gathering, I guess first ones, especially outside of the major cities, usually are, but one that I hope will grow month to month. Next Winchester OCC is at Costa Coffee (above the Brooks Centre car park) in Winchester on July 19.

Andrew Thompson let us in on an idea he has for personal vehicle telemetry which sounded like a neat idea for petrol heads and for fleet managers. Its something that he’d like to develop further and is looking for some direction/business guidance for the project. Curtis, who I’ve worked with before but not seen for several years, was just as I remembered: straight talking, no bull, and overflowing with great advice, contacts, ideas and tried-and-tested advice on getting ideas off the ground and to market.

In summary, it was a small but very interesting gathering of people all looking to do out-of-the-ordinary things. I’m off to the London event now, expecting around 100 people at that one, so its clear we need to grow our Winchester group somewhat. If you’re located near Winchester, Southampton, Basingstoke, Portsmouth, Andover, Salisbury, and of course Winchester or surrounds and your involved or want to get involved in an internet startup, come and join us. The next event is on July 19, 8.00am. Details are here.

It was a pleasure to be invited to the recent North West New Tech Meetup hosted by KPMG in Manchester last week. Credit for the event goes to Manoj Ranaweera, who has an excellent write up on his blog here.

I was fortunate enough to join Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed on the panel to present and take questions, which was quite a privilege since he just about started the whole .com boom in the UK when he launched and subsequently sold Freeserve for £1.6bn less than three years later.

Ajaz is a great testament to determination and pursuit of a clear vision, if you want to hear the whole Freeserve story, including how it reached a £9bn valuation with just 16 people, see here.

I spoke about how we got izimi off the ground and especially how we took izimi to the US bloggers, media, and tech startup shows to build an early beta user base, and about some of the challenges of doing that.

I had many interesting discussions, both during the panel Q&A and also before and after the event, including those with Manoj Ranaweera(entrepreneur and EIPP consultant), Ciaran Murray and Neil Kay-Jones (Totalamber), Anish Kapoor (yuuguu), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Steve Livingston (KPMG), Stephen Morrisey (Innovation Squared), Gang Lu (Netvibes), and David Hawdale (Hawdale Associates), and Ajaz Ahmed (ex of Freeserve and other projects)

I should apologize to others whom I spoke with but neglected to exchange cards, I hope to meet you next time and do so.

It’s hard to point out the highlights, it was such a good event, but a few things do stick in mind:

Finally, thanks to Steve Livingstone for pointing me towards Wagamama’s afterwards for food and drinks!

(header photo courtesy of Manoj Ranaweera)

I knew it wouldn’t be far behind!

At the last SF New Tech meetup at the Metreon on May 30 I watched the preso from justin.tv. AT the end my question was this:

“When will we see Justine.tv?” I asked, half tongue-in-cheek.

Well my lovelies, here it is: http://www.justin.tv/ijustine

Here’s a little fun, copy the following URL, change the “your.name” bit for your first and last name and see what you get.
For example, if your name is John Smith, you’d use http://john.smith.youaremighty.com/

A funny but serious vid about the changing relationship between advertisers and consumers. Enjoy.

The new version of ThinkFree Docs allows users to tag, search and share MS office docs and ThinkFree docs in its online community.

This is the word from the Techcrunch story:

The addition of tagging is immediately evident. Documents viewable by the community now come complete with ratings, embedding code, comment fields, downloading options and the obligatory post this to Digg/ Furl/ del.icio.us buttons. In many ways it’s moving into the territory previously claimed by Scribd, the new features at ThinkFree share a lot of similarity with Scribd, and yet they are not exclusive unto themselves, building upon an already very smart online Microsoft Office alternative.

Thinkfree currently has 275,000 users.