Every user gets 500 MB of storage automatically in MiddMedia and the quota can be increased on request. The system also has support for groups, if you want to let multiple people manage a video collection. As Matt recently wrote, you can now choose to store the video in it’s original quality, 360p, 480p, 720p, or 1080p. The system also supports storing audio files.

The MPEG formats are the most popular ones today and can be used on the vast majority of computers, mobile devices and standalone video players [1]. In addition, to-date, the MPEG group has had the most success in standardizing audio/video formats [2]. Thus, any of the MPEG formats would be best suited for digital archiving. Of the MPEG formats, MPEG-4 was specifically designed to be streamed and to be extremely flexible: it provides excellent quality even at low bitrates (such as on mobile networks) [3].

So, in my mind, MPEG-4 is the format we should use for both streaming and digital archiving. If we’d like to archive physical copies, then archiving to DV tape would also be a good option, as the DV format is nearly universal.

As for streaming, we would be best served by a streaming server that can support both flash and MPEG4 (such as MiddMedia). Converting from an MPEG4 video to a flash video is relatively quick as it requires changing just the container and does not require actual conversion.

Those are my thoughts…

Petar

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/media/media_videoformats.asp
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Experts_Group
[3] http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-4.htm