I stopped uploading video to YouTube a while ago because of poor quality. This week they launched support for HD. They do not officially support embedding of HD movies but there is an easy hack available here, that allows you to embed an HD player like this...
The new search bar drives me nuts and I don't like that you can't go full screen but otherwise it is wonderful to finally have HD YouTube. This will be killer on my Apple TV where I would love watch YouTube content but can't get over how bad YouTube quality looks on a 52" plasma.
Facebook also started supporting HD on Friday. They also are now allowing you to embed videos in other sites, a feature that they have somehow not supported up until now. Here is an example of the same video posted to Facebook...
With these two giants stepping up their video support sites like Vimeo are much less differentiated. Vimeo still has a huge advantage in that there is a community of people who are passionate about creating video which is a very powerful thing. Vimeo is the Flickr of video. Vimeo scores points for having the most customizable player. Here is the same video hosted on Vimeo...
Having HD quality for web video is going to be a game changer. The awful video that we have been watching until now reminds me of animated gifs on the web in the mid 90s. Then flash came and showed us what online multimedia could be. Interestingly it is Flash again that is defining what online video can be.
Vimeo is the Flickr of video for content creation. Unfortunately, Vimeo is the Picasa of video for name recognition. As much as I like Vimeo (for the few videos I've uploaded), I might start uploading to my Youtube account the videos I want people to see.
Posted by: RawheaD | December 07, 2008 at 05:25 PM