Embedr is a relatively new free service that lets you build custom video playlists from a variety of online clip sources and gives you the opportunity to aggregate the entire playlist into a good-looking widget which you can easily share on your blog or website.
It’s an elegant solution for those times you want to embed multiple videos in a blog post or on any web page without cluttering your site and forcing visitors to scroll down in order to watch all the clips you’re sharing. Creating widgets is ridicously simple, but we should note Embedr doesn’t host videos and can only pull videos from third-party services like YouTube, MySpace Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, Vimeo, Blip.tv and more. The maximum number of videos you can add to one playlist is 100.
YouTube, still the premier destination for online video, lets you build playlists as well, but doesn’t offer the possibility to embed the entire playlist into one widget you can spread around. (actually YouTube has such a feature, it’s called Custom Player and it looks like we even wrote it up at the time) Furthermore, since Embedr lets you create a playlist from multiple video sharing services, it is a far more convenient solution when the videos you want to aggregate are scattered around the web. You can see some example playlists here; I particularly enjoyed the “10 Reasons Why Arnold Schwarzenegger Rules” one.
Yubby and iDesktop.tv do much of the same, but the video playlists only exist on their respective websites and can’t be embedded elsewhere as easily as with Embedr, plus the latter also offers a one-click push to networks like Facebook, MySpace and other services thanks to AddThis integration.
Here’s an example widget which pulls together some randomly selected videos from our Elevator Pitches subsite:
Good stuff.