Hardware proliferation would be a real problem for me (as for video server). DVR has actually a simple web interface, so I thought about some video proxy if anybody succeeded to apply such a solution.
Mottion triggered ftp upload is nice idea, but as I stated before it behaves unexpectedly. I have set sensibility to very high and initially it worked fine - I had shots uploaded on my ftp every 5s. After some time (say minute or two) it just stopped uploading shots despite alarm was still triggered. Uploads started again after the alarm had been switched off (no mottion at all) and triggered once more.