Alright, so here's the deal. I was recently hired by a company to follow them around and make little webisode documentary things about the changes in their business and how they're evolving. I'm thinking each episode will be about 10 mins long. It's totally not a corporate instructional video, its grab a camera, put it on auto (crappy lighting conditions) and stick it in someone's face while they're working, getting yelled at....fired....etc. So yeah...fun moments. They want complete transparency.

The advice I'm curious about with this is mainly web related. I don't want to use Vimeo. While I personally love vimeo for my stuff, it seems to be jerky and have problems loading for some people/playing smoothly. Also, since the eps are 10 min long they'll prob be fairly big files. I don't know what to do. Youtube and google video are other ones i want to stay away from bc of the ads and distractions from content. Does anyone have any advice on this? A good player to embed on sites? Maybe just embed a small h.264 file?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Take a look at http://www.sorensonmedia.com The software is excellent.
You can see the results here on my site for encoding http://www.mlotv.com/view/325/the-metal-detectives-shallow-water-hunting-dvd/
The JW flash player is free and quite easy to install.

yeah that JW player looks excellent. Thanks!

You could have a look at www.exposureroom.com.

There is a choice of three qualities for clip views. Clips can be for general viewing or restricted to a limited group by use of a password.

The site is apparently in advanced beta but works well. The operators follow up promptly on queries.

Here is a very short sample clip :-

http://exposureroom.com/members/DARANGULAFILM.aspx/assets/e58d9fda886a4c5babc0680b99a8cccc/

Or host the video under your own branding or even better with sponsorship links, have a look at these guys:http://www.streamingvideoprovider.co.uk/

Their quality is very good and stream times very fast.

Pretty soon you'll be able to host it right here, for free. We're working hard on adding a free video hosting service for DV Info Net members; encoding will be as good as or better than the most popular "other" sites already mentioned. Look for an announcement coming soon...

awesome, thanks chris! ill def. be considering that!

Chris, that is terrific news. Can't wait to hear the details.

well in talking with them it looks like they dont want to host it themselves. so until dvinfo gets that hosting, looks like google video it is. anyone recommend rendering settings for that?