Flow *

Blip.tv was introduced to me by Tom Morris at BarCampLondon

. At the time I was using Our Media to upload stuff to Archive.org. It worked but was far from efficiant or a pleasure to use. So the switch to Blip.tv has made a huge difference, now I'm uploading lots of content and using FTP for example - it doesn't take a long time either. Its easy to think about Blip.TV being another one of those Video services. But actually it has some real sharing which puts it well ahead of the others.

So as you can see above, Blip.tv allows for a serious amount of sharing options. Some of the sharing options are mediaplayers which are simply done through Javascript and Flash. You can also share metadata with flickr, del.icio.us and your own blog. But the big one is the ability to share the actual orginal media with Archive.org (although it keeps failing for me) and Akimbo. This is only possible because Blip.tv keep the orginal media in its orginal format.

Another key thing Blip does is allow you to apply a licence on the media, which could be very important futher down the chain. For example when heading towards a commercial pipe like Akimbo, it shouldn't be allowed if the content is marked non-commercial.

Blip.tv seems to be hinting at a feature where you can transcode your content to other formats. If this is possible, then your going to want to have BlipTV as a pipe for video content. This might sound very wrong using a online service as just a transcoder but actually Blip.tv get the licence to do what they like with your content regardless of applied licence.

Regardless of the specific license you select, you grant blip.tv right to store and distribute whatever information (text, video, audio and other) you submit to blip.tv until and unless you delete it. Without this grant of license blip.tv couldn't work.

This is a little worrying but the service they provide is excellent. Off the pipeline theme for a moment here's a couple other things I really love about Blip.TV. 720p HD Widescreen Video support, longer that 10mins clips, Tagging (commas or no commas blip understands both), attach the video to an upcoming eventand finally the ability to upload more that one version of a clip.

So Blip.tv is a great service now and I think with the introduction of user pipelines Blip.tv could be a popular pipe for video. Good work guys!

After I posted this entry one of the guys at Blip got me on Skype and we got talking. He showed even more things that I'd orginally seen. So the first thing is that Blip.TV does have a Web API. The API supports REST XML, JSON, ATOM and OPML. Blip also supports that XML file you get with Internet Archive uploads. You can now create your own or Blip can now create one for you. This also forms the start of an automated upload service. Talking about Internet Archive, there is now a Blip.tv collection.

Talking about automated uploading I forgot to mention the support for movblogging, which is based around email and allows for automatic cross posting. Which could be seen as pipes within Blip its self. Talking of which, this Blip Widget titled Workflow Status Widget sounds exactly what I think of when I talk about pipes and pipelines.

The Workflow Status Widget is a functional module designed to offer users of blip.tv the ability to assign arbitrary workflow statuses to individual posts. The premise is that an instance administrator should be able to construct an arbitrary workflow diagram of how posts should move through the blip.tv-powered system and implement that workflow diagram within the blip.tv system using the Workflow Status Widget.