PBS video has always been unrestricted and without commercial advertisements in the past, so why not simply make the videos available – in an open file format – and let the users use and distribute in a way that suits them? Use bit-torrent technology to lower your distribution costs and include information about how people can donate to PBS.

Extra points for licensing PBS content under a Creative Commons type copyright license.

Unfortunately, from what I can see of the new PBS portal, this is an effort to get more marketing information from their users, using Double Click web services and Flash programs. I feel it is a shame PBS is not embracing the open nature of the Internet.

Definitely still some growing pains still on the scaling front. I hear you on the quality front and trying to find a good middle ground. You know your audience better than anyone else obviously so you know how your traffic breaks up in terms of connection bandwidth better than anyone else. For me Hulu's default quality is just about perfect. Their higher quality settings are too high for me and my modest DSL connection can't keep up. Anyway, its good to see PBS embracing online video more wholly. Especially from my perspective as a lover of public television who doesn't actually have a television.

In regards to the video quality, it's a constant struggle to find the point where quality is high enough for people with large bandwidth pipes, and making the experience pleasant for those with basic DSL, etc. We'll keep tweaking things and welcome the continued feedback from users.

-Jonathan Coffman, PBS Engage

Would appear that at the moment they are having some scaling issues. Videos sometimes don't start playing and instead my browser reports an error.