Vimeo vs YouTube

I was pretty excited when Vimeo went public a couple of days ago. Both allows its users to upload, host and share videos. Turns out a competing site YouTube has been around for a while. Here’s a quick head to head

Logo
Vimeo went with some italic typeset love while YouTube got a lil bit of TV Guide thing going.. I’m not sure being associated with the old media print magazine does anything for YouTube. Advantage Vimeo

Background
Vimeo was announced in February, it’s been in private beta (lame) and finally got unwrapped to the public in October. YouTube got slashdotted with all that it would entail in August. Advantage Vimeo

Backing
Vimeo comes courtesy of geek-cools Jakob Lodwick and Zach Klein of 2.0 wave riding Connected Ventures. YouTube is based in Palo Alto and got some funding from veteran Valley VC Sequoia Capital. Backing YouTube

Upload
Vimeo and YouTube support all video types by their own admission. Vimeo lets you upload 20 MB a week (reset Sundays), YouTube allows unlimited upload with 100 MB total size per video. YouTube forces the user to fill out more fields (tags and categories) which help on index and searching. Advantage YouTube

Price
Free is ever cool but the service does need to charge for something to be sustainable, Flickr is pay after all Tie

Videos
New Vimeo clips call a WMP or Quicktime plugin for .avi or .mov files respectively. Later on though, all videos are converted to Quicktime. YouTube seems to be using a Flash player which requires the videos to be “processed” (actually downsampled, not cool). Vimeo allows users to stream the videos right away. The widespread playablitiy and buffering from its video plugin are really negligeable, and YouTube adds a nasty overlay at the bottom right of videos, watermarks are so evil. Vimeo lets you download videos to your computer. Advantage Vimeo

Tracking
Vimeo lists comments you make, YouTube lists video views on one page (Vimeo only has views on each post page). Tie

Subscription
Vimeo has a rss feed for latest videos, searches, a feed for each user, each tag, and combination of user and tag(s?). YouTube only has a feed for recently added clips but does have its own closed subscription (to a user) service but you’d have to check your YouTube page to be notified. Advantage Vimeo

Stability
I’ve had Vimeo crashed on me twice though that could be attributed to the Quicktime plugin, I’ve always hated that. Advantage YouTube

Community
Both support favorites, friends and comments. Vimeo supports buddy icons and has better display of comments (in profile, on tag pages). Advantage Vimeo

Metadata
Both support tags which is so 2.0, YouTube also has “channels” which maps to categories it forces videos to be added to which allows an additional way to surf videos (by channels), it’s a bit redundant but more formal. YouTube has optional date and location. Advantage YouTube

Privacy

YouTube has public and private videos, I think private stuff can be viewed by people on “friends” list. Everything is public on Vimeo. Advantage YouTube

Size
YouTube clearly has more content being the older service. A search for a popular rock band returns 2 on Vimeo and 37 on YouTube at the moment. Neither really let you find out exactly how many videos are hosted. Both have a lot of adult content, Vimeo actually has a ban on porn. Advantage YouTube

- Vimeo 4 (Logo, Background, Subscription, Vimeo)
- YouTube 6 (Backing, Upload, Stability, Metadata, Privacy, Size)

In conclusion, YouTube is the more polished service of the two right now but Vimeo has some potential (and momentum). It’s got some spiffiness to it and could easily become the superior service if it can overcome its major caveats (privacy and clip size)