For anyone creating long-form videos such as recordings of lectures, conference presentations, panel discussions, or other lengthy and large videos, Blip.tv is an excellent and cheap means of hosting and distributing your video.

Most other video platforms are limit your uploads to under 500 or even 300 megabytes.  Blitp.tv caters to big file sizes, allowing up to 1GB uploads, making it stand out in an increasingly crowded video hosting marketplace.

Blip.tv is also impressive because of its distribution system—a totally automated system that boasts some of the coolest tie-ins in the market.  After a bit of setup, your uploaded video (so long as its short enough) should automatically be mirrored at Flickr, the Internet Archive, YouTube.  If you’re willing to shell out some dough, you can also mirror your content at Vimeo.com, another popular video service.  If you don’t have accounts with any one of these services, you’ll need to jump through the hoops of a few sign-up forms as account sign-up is not automatic.

In the things that will impress the boss department, Blip will make your video show up on a plain old television.  With support for Boxee, Roku, and the near-omnipresent TiVo, your videos can light up living rooms with little effort on your part.  These syndication deals aren’t as automatic as those listed above—each of these TV-centered services will have to approve an application to syndicate your content.  So, make sure your videos are looking good, your descriptions are clear, and that you have enough content up to show that you’re a reliable source of good quality material.

Aggregation services are also included in this automated distribution system.  Yahoo! Video, AOL Video, Mefeedia, and Blinkx are included and require no additional setup.  If you have a pro account (only $8/month), a video podcast feed will also be created at and automatically submitted to iTunes, saving you the step of updating a separate podcast feed.  (If you already have a video podcast running through Feedburner, you can easily change your source feed to Blip.tv to take advantage of this service.)  To make sure your feed is listed in iTunes a 600×600 graphic should be uploaded to act as your “cover art” for your podcast.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Delicious accounts can also be tied into Blip.tv to save you the time of updating your followers and friends on each service individually.

You can also save yourself the trouble of writing a new post to your blog as Blip supports every major blogging and platform—Moveable Type, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress and others—along with the popular open-source CMS system Drupal.

Other odds and ends in the goodie box at Blip include automatic conversion to MP3 format—which could save podcasters on hosting their own media files—and options for creating your own players as well as hosting multiple formats for the same video.  An upload tool (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is also offered for those who will regularly be pushing large files.

Blip.tv also offers a generous 50/50 revenue split with content publishers who choose to opt-in to their advertising program, a source of income that could help a struggling blogger to pay the bills.

All-in-all this service seems to be the best on the market when considering the incredible amount of automation offered, the flexibility that large file sizes and multiple format encoding offers, and the incredibly cheap price of $8/month for the pro account.

If you have any questions about Blip.tv or if you have a favorite video hosting or distribution software of your own, please feel free to comment below.

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