Online video has now become a mainstay on the internet. There are hundreds of video hosting sites and literally millions of videos. Missed Jon Stewart’s latest headlines or that Bush zinger everyone at work is talking about? How about Stephen Colbert’s The Word segment? Don’t fret it is on the Internet.

Most people by now have been to YouTube (now a Google property) at least once to view some stupid video that a friend told them about. Perhaps Diet Coke and Mentos or maybe Starwars Kid, paradied to great effect on Arrested Development. The Digg video section is very popular and usually contains a few gems beside the regular America’s Funniest Home Videos type clips; here are the best of the year. Another video service that is very popular at the moment is Revver; take a look at the their most watched list. They put advertising into the videos and then share the profit 50/50 with the creators. I still don’t know if that is a sustainable business model but it is interesting.

I upgraded to Windows Live Messenger a while ago and have occasionally noticed an interesting video roll across the bottom of the main window. It started with mostly celebrity gossip clips that I suspect were quite unpopular. Next came music video clips and movie trailers which was a step in the right direction. I generally get my movie clips from Apple’s trailer site so this didn’t interest me either. Finally they started to collect user submitted video which was added to the mix.

The player that MSN uses is Window Media Player and not a flash based solution like the majority of other sites. Every time I’ve clicked on a video thus far it has failed during streaming. I have a very good connection and never have any trouble with other services. The problem is that MSN Video doesn’t seem to buffer the video very well. I suspect it is a combination of Windows Media Player and a very strong DRM but I haven’t looked into it. Give it a try yourself and see how it goes. Oh ya, it requires Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and apparently Macromedia Flash for some reason. Overall I give this product a huge thumbs down; MSN Video sucks.

While researching this article I ran into MSN SoapBox which is yet another video service but this time uses a Flash based player. It is definatly an improvement but has a small set of videos and a poorly designed interface. I noticed bandwidth issues with a video or two from this service too but they are far less frequent. For some reason the site fails to load in FireFox on MacOSX but works fine on FireFox in Windows. Two javascript errors prevent the page from loading but I didn’t spend any time figuring out what specifically was at fault. I am going to reserve judgement on this service for a while but I recommend Microsoft spends a bit of time on it and moves all MSN Video over, including the Live Messenger links. I’m curious to hear the opinions and experiences of others who have tried out this stuff, so leave a comment.