After doing some research, I've found the widely used method of distributing a small Flash player which acts as a streaming proxy for the "real" video file stems back to the Satay Method of embedding Flash content. More specifically,
YouTube and the widely used
JW FLV Player, among others, all appear to be derivatives of this method.
The article,
"Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards" by Drew McLellan has been an excellent source of information while working on my problem of streaming ISO standard
MPEG-4 Part 14 content directly from my own website.
Overall, I've found a single <OBJECT> tag is sufficient to support both RSS syndication and embedded flash video in a standards-compliant manner. The trick is to simply nest an <a><img> tag inside the object tag. Google Reader will strip the object tag, leaving it's children intact. This results in a static image being displayed when reading the syndication, along with a hyperlink back to the original article and the streaming video.
