TotSpot, the social network and publishing platform for parents, launches TotSpot Video. It is an incredibly easy way for parents and families to privately share videos about their children.

Right now, most social sites do not offer video (require embedding from YouTube) and/or lack the privacy protections parents require to feel comfortable uploading their videos. TotSpot Video solves these problems.

They’re one of the first social publishing platforms to incorporate direct video uploads (can’t do it on Twitter or Tumblr) and are, almost certainly, the first and only parent publishing site to offer video.

This isn’t flimsy video either; parents get 250 mb/month of storage and can upgrade to 2 gb/month with TotSpot Plus, premium service, which costs $5/month.

We also think the technical implementation is very exciting and newsworthy. TotSpot Video is a cloud-based video solution. Their system is built on top of Panda Stream – an open source rails video solution that runs entirely on Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, and SimpleDB).

Videos are uploaded, processed, and stored entirely in the cloud. They explored many other options including partnering with the likes of Kaltura, Fliqz, Twistage, and others, but ultimately, open source made it possible (and cheap enough) for them to do this on their own.