In your opinion, what are the best options for adding video to a website assuming it would be rendered as FLV. What are the key considerations?
Would you use a 3rd party service (youtube.com, vimeo.com, etc.) or host yourself? Why? If you used a service, which one? If you hosted yourself is it as simple as using an existing embeddable flash FLV player to access FLV files via HTTP or is there something more you would do in terms of content management, etc.?
Whether you decide to host the video yourself depends greatly on your requirements, hosting environment and technology you use. If it's a small personal site, than it's prefectly ok to host it on youtube or another hosting service, but if you are making a corporate site, it looks much more professional if you host it yourself. Or if the video won't change very frequently it's pretty easy to just host it yourself.
To host it yourself it's just simply puting in a web accessible directory on the server and setting the URL in the player.
If you need to do content management, than keep in mind the possible upload limits you will have on the server, and the fact, that HTTP is not the ideal protocol for uploading large files.
If you have to recode the video on the server, than don't forget that it will be a serious performance hit to it while the encoding is running.
To recode the video on the server I prefer to use FFMPEG or mencoder (both have windows and linux/unix versions).
I guess the question boils down to whether you need to be in complete control of the video, and whether you have money to throw at the project. If you host on youtube etc you are subject to their terms of service and need to work within the constraints of their branding.
When I have needed complete control of Flash video clips for clients I have used the JW-FLV player. It will happily serve FLV files off an HTTP server. It is possible to embed the player in another Flash movie, but most often you will control the playlist from HTML links. Hosting video files can get very expensive, so expect to pay a hefty bandwidth bill.
I would use a 3rd party service if I was creating video for public consumption that had some sort of marketing aspect to it. Host it on YouTube and you can get very good exposure, and people have a chance of finding your video. These services also have global reach in their networks so you may get better performance worldwide.
Google recently released Video for Google Apps customers. This allows you to secure your Google video to users belonging to your organisation. This bridges the gap for some projects that would traditionally use self-hosting.
If you are going to use a 3rd party site, use vimeo - it's a great user experience and great video quality.