I realized recently that I'm watching many more research presentations online than I ever did in the past. It seems that where once you needed to locate and read the paper (and maybe download the slides if available), you can now often find a video online of the author presenting their work. While I'm not suggesting that one no longer needs to read research papers (as I think that is critical for understanding the details of previous work), I am suggesting that the video presentations are a good place to start to understand a new topic. Presentations are often much better at conveying the overall picture of what the research is about and how it fits in with the rest of the literature.
As far as video sites go, I'm a big fan of Google's TechTalks, which are particularly good for their research focus and quality. But even better often are the videos on videolectures.net, which show slides in a separate window and allow you to jump directly to the part of the talk you are most interested in. This allows "speed-viewing" of a number of different presentations from the same conference/workshop/summer-school/etc.
Some examples of great content that I have found lately include lectures from the 2007 Machine Learning Summer School (particularly good is the lecture on Graphical Models), the 2007 Bootcamp in Machine Learning and the 2006 Autumn School on Machine Learning, (which includes seminars by two of my favorite machine learning researchers: William Cohen and Tom Mitchell).
I think in the very near future all of the top conferences will start recording and streaming the talks online. Some of the more progressive conferences are already doing it - see for example the presentations at WSDM'08. In the future, the fact that all the talks will be available online should mean that attending conferences will be even more about the networking and even less about attending talks that it is now!
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