Help getting a large video file to start playing quickly

I'm trying to get a video onto a website in a decent quality, but have it start playing quickly for people. It is about seven minutes of video shot in HD. It was originally given to me as a .avi file, and I have it in a .flv, but it was one gig. It was converted to a .swf but it was still 30mb and still loads slowly, any advice or tutorials on how to get this onto a website in a way that will load quickly (other then youtube) would be apprciated.