Jon Udell: Link-addressable streams, revisited: "Peter van Dijck wrote to tell me about his tool for converting the URL of a Real stream, plus start/stop times, into a link to the specified segment. A while ago, I mentioned Rich Persaud's version of the same idea, which works with Windows Media and QuickTime as well as Real. Using either of these, you can do what I did the other day -- namely, link to a segment within a video stream -- without hacking URLs and wrapper files.
As helpful as these tools are, I've come to see that the hassles they alleviate are only part of the reason why we're as yet unable to weave video effectively into blog conversations.
[...]
Despite these issues, the overriding consideration may be that streams require specialized servers, whereas downloadable clips (which nowadays play progressively) do not.
What we're left with, though, is an asymmetry. Big media organizations, for now, still have the advantage over small independents, because the big organizations are more able to deploy and manage streaming infrastructure. Bloggers can link into those streams, and/or capture and post quotes from them, but can't yet easily produce streams. What we can do easily is produce short downloadable clips. "