The camera comes with standard component cables, HD component cables, a USB 2.0 connection and charging dock, battery, power brick, software, and remote. No HDMI cable is included, but the camera does have a mini HDMI output.

There is a £50 rebate available for UK purchases until the 28th of August: http://media.sony-europe.com/uk/leaflets/209513SonyHandycamA5_4ppleaflet.pdf

I've uploaded some photos taken with the camera here: http://www.putpic.com/gallery/2144/6883142

Regular encoded .flv videos would load perfectly well as I could download from the USA at 200kB/sec and these videos only require about 90kB/sec of bandwidth, but the H.264 video requires about 470kB/sec to load/play instantly.

So, I have coded a simple CDN solution and now videos for users from the Western hemisphere will load from a server in the USA and videos for users east of the Atlantic will load from my server in the UK. I now receive download speeds of 480kB/sec which is just enough for the H.264 video and only limited by my broadband connection.

I shall expand upon the CDN code in due course, but for now it is a perfect and fully automated solution requiring no maintenance.

If you experience any troubles with the videos on the site then please let me know by posting a comment below.

The machine specs: Dell Dimension 9200, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, RAID 0 HDD, GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb, and a Dell 24" wide monitor running at 1920 * 1200.

Update 30th May 2008: Added another TF2 video, this time with me playing as Pyro. Low and high quality versions below.

Not all source videos uploaded will be high quality/definition (cell phone video etc), but it appears that when a high quality video is uploaded to YouTube several conversions are now being made. This allows users with fast internet connections to watch the high quality version.

Sites, such as Putfile, that have had high quality video streaming functionality (example) for over a year have now lost an edge over YouTube which previously swayed some users to register on their site rather than YouTube.

With YouTube providing free high quality video streaming, revenue sharing, groups, and various other features; the days of UGC video sites popping up quickly or established non-niche sites even surviving are surely numbered.

Converting a 90 minute movie from .avi to dvd format used to take about 45 minutes on a 3ghz single core processor, but on this 2.4ghz quad core machine it now only takes about 16 minutes to convert the video.

Akamai is one of those existing CDNs. If you haven't dealt with Akamai before the bottom line is that you pay 10x what you would if you built your own solution, but even that wouldn't add up to $50m.

Jump TV state that they

"provides live streams of some 300 ethnic television shows from 75 nations. Expats, immigrants and foreign language speakers subscribe to the programming which is delivered to the PC. It is also a huge distributor of online sports streaming, providing some 200 sports programs from 30 nations. "

Wonderful, congratulations! But we could also say that Putfile (the site I created and sold) provides millions of video streams to every single internet enabled country on earth. Providing "300 ethnic television shows to 75 countries" doesn't mean that you are pushing masses of traffic (X gig/sec).

The graph below compares the reach (viewers) of Putfile vs. JumpTV.

The graph clearly shows that Putfile has 4x the reach of JumpTV. Putfile doesn't use a $50m CDN, nor a $500,000 CDN for that matter.

Out of interest I priced up a custom solution involving 10 gig/sec of bandwidth from 10 cities worldwide with 10tb of redundant data storage (about 10 times what would be required by an operation like JumpTV) just to see if I could get anywhere close to $50m.

Spec: 10 cities worldwide with 1 gig/sec premium bandwidth per city. 10 gigs/sec bandwidth with 10tb of replicated data.

Per Location:

• $20,000 colocation and bandwidth / month
• RAID 5 arrays, 10tb of fully redundant data storage. $30,000 one off cost
• Front end servers * 10 to connect to storage arrays $20,000 one off cost
• Database servers keep track of "where" data is replicated to $20,000.
• Programming $100,000 one off cost

Total cost per month: $200,000

One off hardware and software: $420,000

Cost of running for 1 year $2,820,000

I believe that the above quoted capacity is 10x what is needed, and that $282,000/year would be a more realistic running cost.

I propose that JumpTV actually purchased $49m worth of powerpoint presentations and $1m worth of CDN.