If you're looking for a video CMS and are considering some like Brightcove, Ooyala, or Kaltura, you might want to consider Bits on the Run, by the people who brought you the JW Player.

I was recently introduced to this product and signed up for a free trial account.  I have to tell you, for what it is, it's a great application that has huge potential.  Especially considering it's mostly open to API and works with the JW Player which is one of the most flexible and supported Flash players out there.  It does have it's short comings, which I'll outline, but the pro's certainly out weigh the cons.

The Bits on the Run video CMS is a great way to organize, encode and display your video assets.  You upload videos, create play lists, create players, and using simple embed codes, publish your players on your site.  It can easily integrate with most CMS as well and even if your CMS isn't one that is supported, hey it's just an embed code, you can handle that!

It's easy to customize the player as well by adding custom FlashVars in.  It supports all JW Player plugins and skins as well.  If you didn't know, Long Tail Video integrates with the JW Player which brings easy to implement pre-roll, mid-roll/underlay, and post-roll advertisements into your videos.  There's no minimum traffic requirement and if you're using Bits on the Run, it's easy to add those advertisements to your videos.  (see my demonstration player below).

Getting Started:

Upload your video(s)

Start by uploading your videos, click the Upload Video link

Once the video is uploaded, you can add meta data to the video 

You also can watch as the video is being converted/encoded.  Note that if the source video is H.264/MP4 or FLV, then you won't be able to re-encode it into different formats, you will only get the source file.  As it's converting, it grabs the first usable frame of video for a thumbnail, you do have the option to upload a new thumbnail or more if you want.

Once all your videos are uploaded, you go to the Player Tab and create or modify the player.  I had a little trouble here.  I kept choosing a player based on my video size, what I discovered is, if you are going to have a play list, either on the side or below the video, you need to size the player to accomodate the play list as well.  So if your videos are 640x480 and you plan to have a play list on the right, you may need to make the player about 740x480 and have the playlist be 100 pixels (you can set that in the player).  Here you can add some custom FlashVars if you want

Finally, go to the Channels tab.  Channels are like playlists.  You can two options, you can create a manual channel that has content you add or a dynamic one which can have rules like, show the most recent 10 or something like that.  I chose a manual one.  Once you are done, save everything, grab your embed code and embed it on your site.  Here is my player I created:

What I like:

• The price.  Like other JW Products, they price it Euro's, you can pay with dollars, but you will have to pay more for the conversion.  Presently their pricing is FREE for 1GB/month of delivery.  Then it goes up from there in tiers. $27, $137, $697/month depending on how much bandwidth you want.
• Easy of use. I've played with several other products like these before.  The workflow here is pretty easy, although I think they should move the the Player to be the second option not the third, since you have to make your player before you can create a channel.  However, once you create a player you can reuse it, so I guess it's not a big deal.  I also like the APIs, the fact that pretty much every JW Plugin works with this, and you can use your own player.  
• Easy monetization - Using a very easy FlashVar command I was able to instanly add advertisements to my videos.  Although the revshare model is good, once you get a lot of traffic you'll want to bring in your own ad insertion model to make more money.
• Basic and not overly complicated - This is a basic video CMS, the others out there do so much more, but do you really need so much more?  This is an excellent product to deep your feet in the water with.  There's no upfront costs, no contracts, and it's pretty low cost.  Even if your project never takes off or doesn't generate the traffic you wanted, you have nothing to lose by going with this solution.  

What I don't like:

• I would like the ability to upload more than 1 video at once
• I would the ability to delete more than 1 video at once
• It would be nice to be able to specify a file store location so if I wanted to deliver my own videos or use a CDN I could
• I would like to see customizable or more flexible encoding profiles
• I found it very annoying that in the player and channel tabs, I had to click SAVE in multiple places to save different changes.  I would like to see just one SAVE or APPLY button on the page.

Bottom Line:

Log on to www.bitsontherun.com  and sign up for a free trial account and give this thing a shot.  This is by far the easiest way to build play lists and publish them to the web.  You don't need to know anything about action scripting, XML files, Dreamweaver, PHP, Java, nothing. Just point and click, and copy and paste.  Is it the best thing out there, no.  But it's still an early version and I suspect we'll see more and more additions to the product as time rolls by.  As a starting point, it's awesome!

- Mike Colburn (StreamMediaGuy)