Online video: YouTube, Viddler en Vimeo

I needed online video for a new web initiative which will be revealed in a couple of weeks. I thought of using YouTube, as it is the most familiar interface to people and it has good coverage on mobile devices. But oops… apparently YouTube reinstalled their 10 minutes limit. This has mainly been done because most longer videos were illegal distributions of TV shows and movies, thereby violating copyrights. Unfortunately, there are no (paid) accounts available that offer longer video length.

Because of the need for length up to even 1 hour, I continued looked for other online video sites. First I met Viddler: in essence it looks good, especially with the podcast exporting features. But “slow” seems to be written in capitals for this service. From the confirmation mail to video uploading (failed due to server timeout!) the service was slow. Irritating slow, frustrating slow, not workable slow. Exit Viddler.

Then I met Vimeo and fell in love. It’s fast, it offers everything I need, and no problems with the time limit. Sure, there is a data limit, but that makes more sense in my opinion. Upgrading to a Vimeo Plus account , which is not expensive. Only the podcast export offered by Viddler seems not to be there, but experiments with HTML5 are (just as YouTube and Viddler are doing). By the way, for those who prefer a more entertaining read on the new HTML version, “Dive Into HTML5” is worth a look!

Some videos are already online for testing. Where? I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks! :-)