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Encoding.com has been around for the past several years, and they have yet another turnkey video encoding service called quick catchingly, Vid.ly. The product, which has been in beta since February, was announced today and so far has had more than five million video views already.

While YouTube dominates the online video space, a new entrant is trying to compete on price and features and may have an opportunity. Vidyard.com announced it is offering a wide array of features, including a choice of embedded players, social sharing and ad-free playback. There are several pricing plans announced on its site, including a free plan for a single video and some basic analytics and a $50 per month plan for unlimited videos.

We've already covered Wistia.com here, which offers somewhat similar services, including the ability to track originating IP addresses, and how much of any given video a viewer has actually seen. Wistia's monthly plans start at $79 per month. And there are certainly plenty of other choices for video hosting sites, including Vimeo which has both basic and plus accounts. For $60 per year for the latter, you get analytics and the ability to upload unlimited videos (the free account provides for a single weekly HD upload).

Vimeo, probably the best site on the internet to watch artistic short videos, announced an expansion of its lean-back feature called Couch Mode today. The feature, which offers a browsing interface that was initially optimized for Google TV, can now be enjoyed anywhere. Couch Mode makes it easy to move from one video right into the next, without using the traditional website navigation. You can access it from the corner of any page on the site.

Vimeo's Ryan Hefner said in a blog post today that Couch Mode "works great" on iPads and Android tablets. In my testing of the feature today I did not find that to be the case.

If all you want is a bunch of people to see your latest video, go ahead and post it on YouTube. If you want a lot more people to see that video or you want to embed it in your Web site or use it to bring mega-traffic to your site, you need to look at other hosting services, not just YouTube. And if you use multiple video hosting sites, you'll want a super-fast, simple way to upload your video to multiple sites. No problem. We'll show you how to do that, too.

The video-sharing app ShowYou is continuing to roll out improvements to its platform, with couple of new features today including the ability to view it on more screens - thanks to a new browser version of the app.

The Web version is similar to the iPad and iPhone app. You can scroll through and view the videos that are in your social streams - shared by you and your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube network and so on.

As a tech journalist who travels a lot, I often find myself sitting next to someone at the airport or on an airplane who wants my advice on whether they should buy an iPad or which apps they should download. (Note to self: start carrying print books again in lieu of gadgets to avoid these sorts of conversations.) Lately, when it comes to showcasing the iPad's wow-factor, I've shown people Showyou.

The video-browsing app launched last month to great praise, much of it comparing Showyou's reinvention of consuming videos on the iPad to Flipboard's reinvention of consuming blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds. The enthusiasm for the app doesn't just come from the tech press. Since its launch, Showyou says it's already fetched over 10 million videos from its users' Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the startup says that users watch, on average, more than 4 videos every time they open the app.

The video-sharing website Vimeo has finally released an iPhone app (iTunes link). And it's totally worth the wait. The new app doesn't just allow you to watch videos on your iPhone and share them to various social networks, but lets you actually edit the video as well.

The app is well-designed and easy-to-use. It includes a video recording interface that should make your mobile videos better, letting you capture video with focus control and grid alignment. Then, once recorded, you can edit and trim your videos, adding transitions, titles, special effects and music. Finished videos can be uploaded to Vimeo from within the app as well.

Vimeo is releasing a "universal player" today that allows user to watch embedded Vimeo videos on mobile devices including the iPhone and iPad using the video playback capability built into the new HTML5 standard.

Vimeo will deliver the optimal player - Flash, HMTL5 or native - based on a user's browser, as well as the appropriate video definition (HD, SD, mobile) and compression standard (H.264 or WebM, an open format developed for use with HTML5).

In our recent discussions of branding for startups and entrepreneurs, we've mentioned that marketing and branding is always harder to do when what you're trying to sell isn't a quality product. Successful startup products tend to fit into an equation involving the ideas and the people who are executing those ideas. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and previously Flickr, says that it wasn't just the idea that attracted her to Hunch; the people behind it were just as important.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.