So you have half a dozen videos or screencasts worth sharing and you want people to view your videos no matter where they are and no matter what devices they are using. Your target audience may be using any of the HTML 5 browsers, Internet Explorer6 (you never know), iPad, iPhone or a smartphone.

The sad thing – all these devices and desktop browsers have their own way of rendering and streaming a video from the internet.

Hence, the same video that looks great on an HTML5 browser, might take ages to load on the iPhone. Another concern is that the screen resolution and the overall video quality will not match, which defeats the entire video watching experience on different devices e.g tablets, smartphones or the desktop.

The Need Of a Single Video Streaming Service for Multiple Mobile Devices And Desktop Browser

Each mobile device supports a different video format and screen size. So if you are watching the same YouTube video from an HTML5 browser and from your iOS device, chances are that either one of them will not be seeing the optimized version of the video.

The problem of video streaming becomes imminent with multiple devices crowding the mobile market, from smartphones to iPhone to tablets – every single device has it’s own way of rendering and displaying the video, streamed from video shaing websites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Facebook etc.

This is where Vid.ly fills the gap.

It’s a new service launched earlier today from the founders of Encoding.com that lets you stream videos to any mobile or desktop device from a single Vid.ly URL (see example)

When you stream your videos through Vid.ly, the service provides you a single Vid.ly URL for the video (i.e there is no separate optimized version for the iPhone or for tablets, for example). The service automatically detects the type of the device which is requesting your video and delivers the correct optimized video format for that particular device.

For example: If an iPad user visits your Vid.ly URL, the service will deliver a beautiful full screen 1024 X 768 H.264 file. But if the same video is being requested from a Nokia N900 user, the service will serve a 320 X 240 3GP video, which is better optimized for smartphones.

Another neat feature of Vid.ly is that the developers will update your Videos as new mobiles, gadgets or tablet PC’s are introduced to the market. So you upload the videos only once and sit back !

No more recursive transcoding, uploading multiple copies and fumbling through a dozen optimized links for the same video. Forget the hassle, embrace Vid.ly.

Learn more on How streaming videos and audios work – Howstufffworks article.

The Vid.ly Embed Code

In addition to fetching optimized copies of your recorded videos, Vid.ly also provides an embed code which can be used to embed the videos on your own website or blog. This is useful in the sense that if a visitor opens your blog from the iPhone, he/she will still see the optimized and HD quality of the video.

Here is the embed code for a Vid.ly video, remember to replace the ID in second line:

<video id=’vidly-video’ controls=’controls’ width=’640′ height=’390′>
<source src=’http://vid.ly/ID?content=video’/>
<script id=’vidjs’ language=’javascript’ src=’http://m.vid.ly/js/html5.js’>
</script>
</video>

Hence, you don’t need to convert and transcode the video to different formats and upload these copies to your web server.  Let Vid.ly do all the work in the background

Browser And Device Support

Vid.ly supports HTML 5 desktop browsers, Android, iOS devices, Blackberry, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericson mobile phones. Under Consoles, Vid.ly has support for Nintendo DS, PSP and Ninetendo Wii.

The following is the complete device support chart for Vid.ly:

Browser and Device Support for Vid.ly

The free version of Vid.ly allows you to upload videos as big as 1 GB in size while the pro version allows advanced features e.g API, specific CDN storage and live streaming over the web.

Vid.ly is currently under private Beta, so you will need an invitation to join. Techcrunch has 1000 invites under their belt, use the beta test code TCRUNCH2011

I think this is going to be a revolutionary service on the aspect of online video streaming. Tell us your thoughts on Vid.ly in the comments below.