Infusing YouTube Videos Into Your Powerpoint Presentations

SlideShare, a mix between PowerPoint and YouTube now allows you to embed YouTube videos into your Flash-based presentations.

Now you can:

1. Include personal introductions in your slideshows
2. Offer video that supports the contents of the rest of the presentation
3. Include demonstrations of a website’s features.

Until now, adding video in to your presentation meant that you had to include links to separate video files, which sort of defeated the purpose of having a really simple way to share PowerPoint presentations.

Keep in mind that it isn’t currently possible to make a video auto-play; also you must deal with YouTube’s standard "feature" of linking to a video’s YouTube address whenever you accidentally click outside of the "Play" arrow. Other than that, it’s a great addition to the service. Also notable, that while this is the first time SlideShare has supported embedded video, the site has allowed users to embed audio alongside their slideshows since 2007.

You can check out a sample slideshow below.





SlideShare also launched an impressive "cloud-based" feature that ties your native PowerPoint client your SlideShare account.

Similar online services include SlideRocket, DocStoc, Scribd, SlideSix, and SlideBoom.

Cybercast credit: SlideShare and YouTube

Vbrick: A Foundation for Your Video Ecosystem

Vbrick Systems is a relatively "old player" in the online video scene, providing technology to websites for video hosting. It's about to launch new hardware and software for streaming and pay-per-view video.




It also hopes to bring in more money by embedding advertisements in some of the videos it serves, on top of the $30 million in revenue last year and reports that 2008 will be even more profitable. They've been helped along the way by a partnership with Akamai Technologies, a company that will improve its network resources, and by a total of $62 million in VC backing to date.

VBrick's complete product line is designed to create a foundation for your entire network video ecosystem, and is made up of:

EtherneTV
Is their enterprise-wide solution composed of a set of scalable, industrial strength, network-aware appliances that allow organizations to build a video infrastructure on top of any existing IP network. Each component plays a significant role in capturing, recording, managing, distributing, and viewing your video assets.

VBrick Appliances
Industrial strength, portable VBrick Appliances deliver video on local area networks, wide area networks, and the Internet through its customers' VPN IP network.

VBCast
Travel to a location, connect your camera and microphone and begin broadcasting. The package contains everything you need to go live in an instant.

VBrick’s software and video appliances enable you to distribute a live webcast, complete with timed PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides???

You can also view and record a live feed from remote appliances. Now, that's more like it for me.