Hi @mrbloom. I also experienced upload difficulties by uploading my guitar video two days ago. It guess steem has a problem adding all videos to IPFS due to massive upload requests by users.

There is a way to manually add content to IPFS. There is a tutorial (unfortunately only in german):

Another 2 possibilities are:

1. upload at a time where upload requests of users are lower (e.g. morning). My upload got finished within 20 seconds then.
2. Wait some days until steemit fixes this issue.