YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing site in the known universe. That doesn’t mean it’s the best one, but only that it’s one you can’t afford to ignore if you want your video to have the best chance of being seen.
Until SMUG moved to its self-hosted home, our video player options were limited, because wordpress.com essentially allows YouTube and not much else. You can’t embed a flash widget, which is what most video players are.
Now we have choices, and one I started exploring last night was Vimeo.
Here’s a bit of a review.
First, I love that you can sign up for Vimeo using Facebook Connect!
You just sign in by click the little blue icon you see to the left of the sign-up:
Shortly thereafter a window pops up asking if it’s OK to connect your Facebook and Vimeo accounts:
And when you give permission, you see a message like this:
Very simple. Very cool.
And here’s our non-Super Bowl ad:
Not Really A Super Bowl Ad from Lee Aase on Vimeo.
One limitation of Vimeo is, well… the limitations.
- You have a max of 500 Mb of file uploads per week (without paying for the “Plus” account), and
- It’s only for strictly noncommercial use: only videos you have created and not for business use. So when I uploaded my SMUG Super Bowl Ad as a demonstration (embedded below), I made sure to title it “Not Really a Super Bowl Ad” so the administrators will realize it’s a tongue-in-cheek video from a strictly non-commercial entity.
On the positive side, it does offer HD, and some of the videos I watched are absolutely stunning.
Vimeo isn’t really an option for people wanting to use social media tools in their work, but as a personal video sharing site it could be a good choice.
In a future post I will compare the same video file (our Super Bowl Ad…or Non-Ad) in various video players. So…to help me build the menu of options:
Do you have suggestions of other video sharing services I should try?
