This book goes into the high level technical details of creating an online video service. As an absolute newcomer to the field, I found it an invaluable tool for dealing with the knowledgeable professionals that I rely on to do such things as analog to digital conversion and the set-up and maintenance of media servers. This book will not give you the expertise to do any of these jobs - for that you have to get your hands dirty and actually perform some of the tasks yourself. But it will give you a grasp of the concepts and terminology you'll need to manage the issues that come up.
The book is solid all the way through, but some topics are treated with more detail than others. The sections at the start about video capture, compression, and file formats are in depth and somewhat technical. Later section, including one on transport protocols and DRM, are considerably more vague, probably because they are such complex topics that even an overview takes up the alloted space. Still, when I was able to dive into the details of capturing video from analog sources, compressing it, and setting up the software to serve it, but I could not have even begun to attack the problems of setting up a transport standard or a DRM scheme.
It should also be noted that one chapter out of the 8 provided is on a topic (enterprise multicast) that is not relevant to most consumer focused video services.
If you're going to be involved with online video at all, this book is an excellent technical overview. Highly recommended.