BLIP IN YOUR FACE!

EDIT!!
Neat biz, looks like Vimeo.com now supports mobile video! You can go into your vimeo videos and check the Alternate Versions under the Video File tab under settings, and all of your vids will be made into a mobile (read iPhone :) compatible file as well. Gonna go cruise Vimeo on me iPhone and see if the embed players pop up with the mobile version! If this works with play-lists or albums in the embedded player, Vimeo just became the champ!

Ok little bit of a rant here, you know working with church media we are always trying to find inexpensive ways to get video streaming and archived to folks. A two services we have tried are Vimeo.com and Blip.tv. Both are good. Blip has very good stream, little artifacting, and such. Vimeo, the same. Though the stream seems to come a bit quicker via blip. Blip also offers auto update of xml for podcasting (through their service) and iphone compatible player through their site. Which all seems great. But wait. It isn't completely.
Trial one with blip.tv pro.

1. We uploaded multiple videos, and were happy with the playback. But they all had advertising before and after each video. We had to go into our preferences and disable that.
2. We used the iphone compatible player using their playlists. problem. they don't actually support that. Though they don't tell you that when you build the player. So when someone came to watch the archive on the site with their iphone, they got a random blip video from the site. Which just so happened to be a Transexual Sex ed teachers video blog. Nice huh? Glad I caught it before anyone else did.
3. If you use their share feature for the video, it links directly to the video on blip, not your site! And even if you get the pro feature on blip, they still show (with thumbnails) links to featured and random episodes on your videos page! On one video there was a nearly nude woman on it. Not good for a church video site!
4. The podcast feature of blip.tv seems to work very well. And if you click on the website link in the podcast, it goes to where you send it. Just point all links wherever blip allows to your own site or vimeo. The only wish I have for the podcast is that it would only publish to podcast what you tell it to. That way you could feature videos to be "vodcast" and not all your uploaded videos would be on the "cast".
5. The distribution feature of blip is great. it sends video to flickr, aol, and vimeo! So we are still covered on those other bases. If we embed, and want to have a share feature, we just have to do it on the page, or embed with vimeo.

I will try to flush this post out a little more later. Will update as opportunity comes. Just smashed this out real quick like. God bless in your endeavors!