OK Joost and Veoh are going neck and neck in the PC video wars. I like the new Veoh download. They are getting close. One thing that no one has yet to be done is a good navigation technique for video. Note I didn't say search.
Search really came into it's own when google realized the value of a millisecond. They realized that service is about "expectation management" users expect instant. People percieve "instant" visual things in the millisecond range. Google made the smart choice of pending 100X in $'s to store popular search pages in RAM instead of generating them in from a database involving a disk access. This meant the difference between micro seconds response and millisecond response. To users the difference was huge. It set the bar for google and the percieved level service very high. I know the relevancy of page rank was head shoulders above the rest as well. If you are a big company with a usability lab, try seeing how your "percieved" service, widget, app etc. improves by shaving off the microsecond load and response. Look before you AJAX.
Nobody to my knowledge has sorted this out in video. TV's provide almost instant response, but video sites and download tools P2p still aren't there for the navigation yet. Veoh has made big strides and the latest TV approach is good, interface response is still kind of wonky. Call me up Dmitry, lets talk about it :)
I think the smart thing for a video site to do would be come with a way of letting people "surf" video the same way they channel surf. Looking at Still a la youtube etc. isn't it. Blinkx.com gets some credit for being close, with their wall of video. My own suggestion for the guys with downloads is to autoload a guide that is a big pre-emptive clipfile with the either the first 15 seconds of each show and the "loudest" assumed most active 7 second segment from that show. Then come up with a way to surf channels, very quickly probably a combination of buttons and visuals similar to blinkx. This is easier technically than coming up with the "video" equivelant of pagerank and the evil AI problems of object context recognition that has so many PHd candidates steamed up about being the "Google" of video.
Serve the needs of couch potatoes with a millisecond moving, singing, video surfing experience and reap the rewards.
