About 3 days after putting Dogster live in January, 2004, I thought letting people share videos would be superb but I knew I could never surmount the inherent formatting, hosting, serving and bandwidth issues. Perhaps a year later, a new dog community site appeared which had support for window media videos. I was envious but was still not even close to commiting to supporting video. I’ve been racking my brain to recall the site name but simply can’t anymore.

Then, the tech world caught up with us. Starting in March of this year, we found ourselves being courted by a slew of companies vying to be our video partner. They were ready to handle all the original problems (encoding, hosting, publishing, bandwidth). We literally got to choose from an amazing set of features and support. For us, Video Egg was the pick of the litter. Video Egg has no interest in building its own community; they want to be the video plumbing for communities. Using Video Egg, members can literally drag and drop videos from their harddrive onto our webpage and within minutes the video appears on their pet page. The best part is that the Video Egg app pre-encodes movies on the member’s desktop greatly reducing the filesize and thus the time needed to upload the file. Members can also make movies from their webcam within our webpages, send movies from phones, edit movies on their desktop, and of course can embed uploaded movies in any other webpage they want.

We’re also moving boldly into the present by making our entire video uploading tools ajaxian. Users users can add tags, add comments, and upload a second video while the first one is still uploading.

The geek in me really appreciates all this but the pet lover in everyone is going to melt when you start watching these videos. They are not going to save the world, but they are sweet and addictive and funny and so much of what Dogster and Catster are all about.

Five hundred videos are already posted. When we get to 5,000 videos, we’re going to launch a dedicated viewing area complete with ratings, favorites, tagging and the works. Watch out America’s Funniest Home Videos, we’re hoping to be challenging you for the superlative before the year is over!

See all dogs that have uploaded videos.

See all cats that have uploaded videos.