A discussion about Flash Movies

[Ms Naughty]

I've realised I'm a bit behind the times when it comes to movies (I've yet to make a movie based free site) but it's time I caught up and I wanted to start a thread about it.

I've been doing the research into making flash videos for the web, converting mpgs and wmvs to flv files and stuff. It's a bit of a learning curve. I did a search of the board but there aren't too many threads on the topic.

So... how do the others on this board feel about flash movies? Not necessarily on tube sites, but as things that can be embedded into blogs and also as affiliate content - I've seen sponsors offering movie galleries with the videos embedded as flash. There's also the idea of sponsor hosted embeddable flv players for blogs.

Is it better to use flash than the other movie formats? Does it use more or less bandwidth?

Do you feel you make more or less sales when it comes to flash movies? Have you found them to be a useful sponsor tool?

Do linklist owners have an issue with flash movies being used on freesites?

Does anyone have any suggestions for resources on this topic? I've found a few sites, will add them in a separate post.

By the way, I'm not talking about using flash to make websites - I'm sure we can all agree that those long stupid intros are frustrating. I'm really talking about flvs and swfs movies that can be embedded into a page.

And yes, I guess this is a big, broad thread topic, not terribly specific. Just wanted to get a conversation going, find out what others are doing with this medium.