Oh Tim, you really hit a hot spot about vlogs.
First of all, we still live in the age when not everyone is using at least a quality broadband connection and having a vlogging service it's a very brave choice.
First of all, you will need lots of bandwitdh (let's ignore that because we must focus on more important things).
As an alternative to the stadard VIDEO formats (mpg, avi, mov, etc), services like
YouTube offer a different video format, which is the old mighty FLASH.
However, that involves huge costs because LOTS of servers have to work on converting the big ammount of uploaded video into flash format. And probably some people know that only the
Flash Media Server License costs about 4500$. It's terrible for a small team to start something like this without a good planification.
And that's just the cost of the stupid license. You also must have some cool converters which transform different uploaded file types into flash video format. And that's a problem too. Decoding a video and encoding it into a different format... uh THAT's a lot of work added on the backs your server (s).
However, I noticed this service, they were smarter and the approach looks better:
VLOGIT, good one. Why using your servers to process all the video comming from bloggers instead of using their computer's ressources. Clever.
The user records the info into his computer, and then uploads it directly into flash format, that's evil, and I like it. Cost effective. Probably the best idea if you want to start a blogging service for people.
there is another story, recording video directly from a source (webcam, handycam, etc) into your application. Not everyone is able to do that because if their connection is slow, the recording will look awful -- video will look like s*** actullay, because the watcher will be able to see few frames of the video and that's it. The speed of the video is superior against the speed of the internet connection and that is a big disvantage for the user.
I still believe that the best idea to have a video service (blogging, social newtworking) is to have people record their videos into their computer before uploading it. And as Vlogit did, it's AMAZING to have visitors uploading videos directly in the format you need it (flash for example)... saves a lot of money.