Hi Justin,
this is a long one, apologies!
We have a full on video & audio transcoding, lecture capture & personal capture system at Sussex based on the open source http://opencast.org/matterhorn/ + moodle.
Before we integrated this institutional youtube/soundcloud into our moodle the majority of our tutors thought audio and video on the interweb were indistinguishable from 'magic' or required the full services of the bbc. Fortunately, once we made it simple for them - they seem much happier with it all.
To start with lectures are recorded in rooms with the necessary metadata, auto transcoded on the matterhorn server into mobile friendly, flash versions etc and then tutors can 'claim' them in moodle through a custom moodle mod - lecture recording.
Here is a video of this workflow -
Students can watch lectures on any device, download them etc and in our 'top tips from students for tutors' research it came out as one of the highest rated things in our moodle.
The matterhorn 'engage' player page mixes flash and html - it not currently great it terms of usability, but it looks like it will be getting better http://engagedevcamp.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/theodul-pass-player-the-new-matterhorn-engage-player.pdf.
It does some great things like ocr of slides, subtitling and building chapters into videos and this seems to be getting better all the time with a major focus on accessibility (its great to use with screen readers and without a mouse).
We built lots of custom things like our own none-flash fallback but they seem to be building many of these into the next version - the community http://engagedevcamp.wordpress.com/ are a good bunch.
For personal capture we built an mvp upload to matterhorn - just a button on the wysiwyg editor in moodle. In practice this is really rather powerful.
It means that anywhere you have a wysiwyg editor in moodle, you can upload a recording and it will return the embed/iframe of your recording (with a message as to how far it is in processing) into the html - in quizzes, assignments, forums, messages, marking and giving feedback - you name it. Flip learning becomes very simple. If you have a wysiwyg editor on the page, you can add a recording.
It is just a standard html select button, with a few html5 params, but in practice this is incredibly powerful. On mobile/tablet it gives you direct access to the device camera to record - it just works
Desktop it actually lagging behind because, as you say, html isn't quite there yet. You cannot yet do it all in the browser, but it is getting there.
As you probably know there are already a plethora of real time web video chat systems https://apprtc.appspot.com/ in html5 and i built a webrtc for moodle, with flash fallback, that still has a few teething problems, but most importantly makes the rather expensively licenced ways we normally do this stuff obsolete....
...and there are some rather fun javascript libs to capture/record/download your getusermedia http://ericbidelman.tumblr.com/post/31486670538/creating-webm-video-from-getusermedia with all of the majour players pushing for http://www.w3.org/TR/mediastream-recording/ although at the time of writing my code can currently only record/capture the live video (without audio) as a download or into moodle
For the moment we allow the user to use anything they have (native mobile/tablet or desktop app) to record & upload - then take care of transcoding it into an appropriate format for anyone to watch - which is a huge educational win, especially for our language and sign language courses.
While none-opensource products like http://mediacore.com/ are out there people can always buy an offtheshelf version, but i completely agree with your sentiment/vision that this is an important part of the future for online learning - as important as uploading a pdf/doc was creating the online text in a wysiwyg editor is today - and strategically it would be advantages for moodle hq to start thinking about this now, before it passes them buy.
Did you read/watch https://www.ezuce.com/blog/1749751/the-promise-of-webrtc-for-higher-ed ?
Thanks again for kicking this off.
Cheers
Stuart Lamour, user experience developer, university of sussex (http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/elearningteam/)