Embedding content - Use iFrame, JS/jQuery, or what?
<p><strong>This gets somewhat complex, so first, a little background:</strong></p>

<p>We're redesigning a video platform that we use across internal applications and our customers use as well for video delivery. The goal is for our customers to be able to embed stuff easily to put it on their own sites, as you would expect. Thus far, we've given a one-line script tag to do this, like so, which drops a player on a page:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;script src="http://vod.nimbushd.com/player/player.ashx?mediaItemAssetId=8413adeb-6b15-4606-a771-637527539093&amp;h=480&amp;w=720" type="text/javascript"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
</code></pre>

<p><a href="http://static.nimbushd.com/Brandon/EmbedV1Sample.htm" rel="nofollow" title="&#40;Sample page with the above&#41;">Sample Page with the script above</a></p>

<p>This is just an ASP.NET handler that returns some Javascript, which, in turn renders some HTML for the player.</p>

<p>That works well enough for a player, but now on to the redesign.</p>

<p>We're now targeting different players for different browser types, HTML5 fallback in the absence of Silverlight, and some other bells/whistles. One of our big feature requests is to be able to serve up a player with add'l video gallery, Disqus comments, Twitter/Facebook share/like buttons; basically, regardless of the philosophy that these are things that should live natively on the customer site, <strong>we need to be able to design more complex features and serve them up the easiest embed-style possible</strong>.</p>

<p>I guess one school of thought is that we almost need an iFrame that behaves like embedded content (no scrollbars, sizing, and so on).</p>

<p>We're tossing around ideas like more complex Javascript-rendering HTML that could get impossible to maintain pretty quickly, whether advanced features should just be Rich content (Silverlight/Flash), or if there's some in-between like a jQuery partial page refresh or something.</p>

<p>Hoping to learn from some folks who have already gone down this road - <strong>as an end-user, how would you expect to embed content</strong>, and <strong>as a content provider, how do you serve that content in embeddable form?</strong></p>
