VidCaster is a new site that lets you automatically import all the videos you might have on your account at YouTube (I don’t think they use the term “import” — it may be more like “sync-up”) and create your own video site.
One benefit could be eliminating having to see other videos and comments that you’d find on the YouTube site, which, if you’re showing a video to a class, can be potentially distracting. Of course, there are plenty of other web tools that do that same thing, like Quiet Tube.
The other, potentially much more important benefit — but which I won’t know for sure until I try it out at school tomorrow — is that the videos on VidCaster don’t appear to have YouTube “branding” (you can check my VidCaster Channel here). There might be a slight chance that having them on VidCaster means that they won’t be blocked by school content filters (at least until the content filterers figure it out). Or, if VidCaster is blocked, it might be considerably easier to get a District to let a teacher’s VidCaster’s channel be made accessible to students than a teacher’s YouTube account.
You can learn more about VidCaster at TechCrunch.
Larry — great post, you hit the nail on the head re: a VidCaster site being a less distracting way to showcase videos. We’ve had a few people interested in using VidCaster in the class room — one of the reasons (as you mentioned) is that YouTube is often blocked there. Because our VidCaster Free plan is powered by YouTube, if YouTube embeds are also blocked, those students would be able to visit your VidCaster site but they may not be able to play the videos. However, if you are on a VidCaster Silver or VidCaster Gold plan, you get to use our video player and if you tie it to your own domain, you only have to worry about your own site being blocked.