Youtube.com is worlds most popular video sharing website. The benefits are that it is easy to use and it's owned by Google, so it's unlikely that the service will go away. It's easy to embed youtube videos in other sites like facebook and myspace or a personal blog. The big negative is clips are limited to ten minutes and the quality of the video is degraded when it's uploaded. This makes it a poor choice for people that want to host long format videos.

It's interesting that Google owns You tube and operates Google Video as well. Google video allows you to upload as many videos as you like without any limitation of length or file size. It also has some basic privacy controls to make the video publicly available or restricted to a group. All of this is offered for free.

Yahoo Videos is similar to Google Video and YouTube. But the site is geared more to people uploading collections of videos. It has a good search that pulls in videos from other services, but it does have a few limitations. I think the biggest limitation is the size limit. Videos must be under 150 MB.

I started looking into these services since we are looking for a video hosting service to store family videos. What I was hoping to find is a place that would take videos of any length and keep master copies of the videos without losing any of the quality. All of the free services transcode the videos into a format that can be viewed on the web and this means that they reduce the bit rate and the quaility of the video. So these services are good for sharing, but I wouldn't recommend them as a cloud hosting service that you can count on to replace your local hard drive.