A mere two years later, and I can barely go online without video being an intrinsic part of the daily web experience.

Despite the web being flooded with video content these days, its still easy carve it all up into different kinds. I’ll give that a go below.

First of all, there’s the copyrighted stuff that has been ported to the web -Hulu (which we cant get in the UK, but is like the iPlayer for the US networks), BBC iPlayer and 4OD.

Then you can get live TV and freeview channels on Zattoo.

After the copyrighted stuff we move into a whole new realm, and this is where it gets fun. These are all the sites that allow the syndication and placing of content, a selection of example can be seen below. They come in different shapes and sizes, and mean different things to different people.

Joost

Joost pushes all sorts of content through its site – mostly i dont get a lot out of the selection, but there is some licensed stuff.

Current

Current is a real digital TV channel, and its web content is blended between the TV stuff and the web-only bits. Its mostly news, movies, music and culture, but there is a good selection, including the Viewer Created stuff.

Youtube

What can we say – the original ‘broadcast yourself channel’ the good the bad and the ugly.

Vimeo

Vimeo is the Youtube for designers and creatives… slightly less popular, but nicely done and with good content generally.

Retrocycling Robot from Challenge Your World on Vimeo.

TED

The variety of informative content here is unsurpassed. All videos are talks given to live audiences and relayed to the web. Science, technology, art, culture and more. Superb stuff.

The Onion

Nobody beats The Onion. I think they invented satire. Even before the web-video period these guys rocked. Now its all in moving images.

Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment Of Women

http://www.purepwnage.com

Projects like Pure Pwnage are sprouting up everywhere. The web-based sit-com/reality/weirdness is now being pushed to network TV. Can you say chicken and egg ?

Google video

The home of serious chunks of info. A huge selection and typical Google freedom. I love it solely as it hosts Zeitgeist.

Now, along with all these sites are the application based platforms. Enter Boxee, AppleTv etc… These apps do a selection of extra functions that appeal to users – connect to Online sites such as Youtube, Flickr NetFlix, Pandora, even the Apple movie trailer collection. They also allow you to browse your local machine and load content that you have lying around, and you can do all of this from your armchair, using a remote control.

These are just a selection of the video/content sites that offer a landscape of content, if you look hard there are hundreds more in the vein of comedy, movies, gaming, technology etc…  and we didnt even talk about Vodcasting…  and did i mention live event streams like the ASP World tour events ?.

In a nutshell, along with torrent’s, this is why I dont watch TV anymore. You can pick and choose whatever you want to view, and for the most part totally avoid advertising.

One of my pet-projects at the moment is the information site for Beadnell Bay – http://www.beadnellbay.info.

On it Ive created a page specifically for the surf report that im providing for the area (http://www.beadnellbay.info/surf-check/), and Ive been looking for an efficient way of running the content.

Its really not that hard, you go to the beach, take a photo, go back to the office, upload the image to the web server, and hey-presto, you have a surf report. But, doing this every day will take up more tim than is ideal, and is very repetitive.

So how can we make the process more streamlined ? how can it be easier ?

I had tried a few ideas, and had searched for the best solution online, and the best I had come=up with was to use Yahoo Pipes to push the latest image from a Flickr group into the page. The pipe is here if you want a look -

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=tgsFay003hGYXDqQBR50VA.

However this is not really what I wanted. The images do not display large enough, and whilst its nice running it through Flickr, linking out to the set is not ideal.

Enter technology and the perfect solution.

Apple iPhone

Im already using my iPhone to take the photograph and push it to the Flickr group, so ideally I wanted was something as easy to use but with a btter web presentation.

Enter the right application, and a little bit of AJAX.

FTP Picture upload provides a simple and easy way to FTP any picture from your iPhone to the web server of your choice. With a little tweaking, it was up and running in 10 minutes and i had the right image on the server.

On the page I could now print the latest image as uploaded form my iPhone. Fantastic.

However the image being displayed could not be identified as recent. How where users to know that the shot was taken today ? or even this week ?

What I wanted was a script that could find out when the shot was taken and print that to the page, telling the users the image was recently updated.

JavaScript alone can not do this, but the helpful people at http://twitter.com/javascripthelp quickly pointed out that the XML Http Request can grab the Last Modified date from the header of any file on your server.

With that, I searched, found the right piece of JavaScript and then set it all in motion. (code is below).

The surf report image now displays, is enlargeable, and has the upload date and time printed next to it. And all automated via the iPhone.

Along with this, I post a text update via Twitter and you get a pretty decent surf report.

******************  Example Code ******************

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var xmlhttp=false;
try
{
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject(“Msxml2.XMLHTTP”); /* for IE < 5 */
}
catch (e)
{
try
{
xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject(“Microsoft.XMLHTTP”);
}
catch (E)
{
xmlhttp = false;
}
}

/* mozilla & opera */
if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!=’undefined’)
{
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
}

var upDated

function getUpdated(){

xmlhttp.open(“HEAD”, “MyPic.JPG”,true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
upDated = xmlhttp.getResponseHeader(“Last-Modified”);
document.getElementById(“theDate”).innerHTML = upDated;
}
}
xmlhttp.send(null)
}

</script>

</head>
<body onload=”getUpdated();return false;”>
<img src=”MyPic.JPG” alt=”MBP_box” width=”500″ />
<br/>Picture updated on – <p id=”theDate”>Updating…</p>