Thoughts on Vimeo –vs- YouTube

Posted by Cotton Rohrscheib on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 · Comments

The other night at the Central Arkansas Refresh a couple of us were discussing Video sharing platforms, primarily YouTube and Vimeo. I have been recommending Vimeo to my clients for a while now to use as a method of storing and sharing their video content on their websites.

My reasoning for choosing Vimeo over YouTube mostly has to do with the fact that I like Vimeo’s player a lot better, but there is also a noticeable difference in quality. If you are unfamiliar with Vimeo, here’s an explanation from their website of the service:

Vimeo is a thriving community of people who love to make and share video. From simple moments to masterpieces, Vimeo is the perfect home for you to upload, store and share all the video you create. Your video’s quality and security is important to us, and that is why we’ve built advanced privacy options, sharing tools, and high quality video encoding. So whether you are an amateur filmmaker, proud mom, restaurant critic, or just a guy with a cellphone, connect with Vimeo today.

I should probably state for the record that I am not a video guru, 99% of the time my partners and I outsource video projects for our clients to a list of providers that we recommend or have worked with in the past. This arrangement has always worked out well for both us and our clients. With this being the case, we rarely host video content for our clients, instead we just embed content from these video sharing sites, as is the case with most development firms that I know of today. This is just standard practice anymore.

Disadvantages to Vimeo

There are a couple of disadvantages I guess for going with Vimeo over YouTube, exposure probably being the biggest one. YouTube naturally gets more traffic than Vimeo, it’s just a given. But with the growing popularity of Vimeo, and the ability to use Facebook Connect to post and comment on videos, it’s probably just a matter of time before Vimeo catches up with YouTube. Another disadvantage to Vimeo is the fact that you can’t play video content from inside Vimeo on the iPhone because there isn’t an app available yet. This is of course a concern in the Vimeo community and there are some interested parties looking to release such an app in the very near future, see the Vimeo future request forum post. You can also find some good quality comparisons on Vimeo’s community forum between Vimeo and YouTube.

Advantages to Vimeo

Earlier I cited the quality and clean appearance of Vimeo as the main reasons I like their service over YouTube, but in one comparison I read, they cited the following:

support for high resolution (HD) content

stereo audio without fuss

option to download the source (non-transcoded) original video file

option for content owners to replace an existing video file, while preserving likes, comments,

real-time status updates as video is uploading and converting

advanced privacy options, like password protected videos

post-conversion alerts (they’ll email you when your video is ready)

video information (title, description) can be added while the video is uploading, not before

more advanced and customizable embedding options

Which to Recommend…

So, at the end of the day who do you recommend to your client for video sharing? My thoughts are both! It only takes a little bit of time to upload videos to both YouTube and Vimeo, so why not create both? You can get the most exposure inside of YouTube for your content and utilize Vimeo’s customizable embed options to display the video on your website. I don’t see a real problem with handling video content this way, and I have a few clients doing this right now. Granted, it’s a little bit more work, but at the end of the day they realize that they have a lot invested in their videos and usually don’t mind an extra process or two if it means it’s going to give them more bang for their buck.

Don’t take my word for it, there are also some other opinions on this topic: