YouTube Alternatives?

I think Vimeo has stepped up their game recently possibly.  I used to have a tough time getting my uploads to complete. The few I’ve done in recent weeks haven’t had any upload issues at all.  I’ve got a ‘Pro’ account, but I really mostly renewed it this year to support their community.  I’m glad I stuck with it.  It’s a pretty thriving community for talent – not that I would claim myself to be amongst the ranks. 

There are some really cool videos on there.  I don’t search through it nearly enough to check them out, but I’ve seen some cool stuff.  I like the time-lapse stuff personally – some of those are super cool and must have taken a huge amount of work to compile.

Anyway, with a ‘Pro’ Account – you are limited to 5 gigs a week uploading.  Depending on what you are trying to do that might need to be noted.  If you want to share a feature length documentary for example – you’ll have to throttle down your bitrate to squeeze it in under 5 gigs.  Youtube is exceptionally liberal in that regard – I think like 20 gig uploads maybe and unlimited time when you are in good standing.  Vimeo allows you to store the original file for download distribution if you like though on the flipside of that point. 

Vimeo does seem to have a slight edge in encoding quality too, but they try to steer you away from providing a 1080p stream by default.  You have to select 1080p to be available for every upload if you want it and it has to encode for that after it has encoded for 720p.  Not really a big deal, but something to be aware of if your video looks – well, 720p and not 1080p like you may have shot it.  I’m sure it’s to save on bandwidth – it costs money to stream the higher resolution. 

Personally, I feel like I trash up the neighborhood with my videos LOL.  I try to do better, but it’s like parking your trailer home in a nice neighborhood to upload crappy videos that belong more on Youtube.  They need the cash though; so, it can’t all be perfectly polished professional stuff.  They seem to like to provide tutorials that cater to beginners as well.   

I’m also enthused to see Vimeo available on so many ‘Smart Televisions/Devices.’ Their apps are generally pretty slick if not at least consistent across the platforms I’ve seen them on.  I might not care to spend hours creating and burning off a Blu-ray disc for my latest ‘project’ and rather upload and stream it back on the television.  I’m not super impressed with my experience with DLNA (media home networking on smart televisions) for that matter – even if I am setup to play them otherwise over WiDi.  It’s pretty user friendly to just pull up the built in app and let it stream back.