Vimeo is silky smooth
During the production of the Email Standards Project video, I needed to find a hosting service to serve the video.
We were anticipating quite a few views (over 1600 so far), so the bandwidth costs would be significant. Our main priority in selecting a service was quality, which meant no tiny and heavily compressed Youtube. We'd seen Vimeo used before and decided to check it out. Good choice, as it turned out.
Signing up
Right from the homepage Vimeo makes a good impression. As a non member, the very top of the page is a one line signup box - enter your name, email and password, hit the 'join now' button and you are in.
You don't have to signup to view videos, and there is other signup links on the page, but if you just want to get your video uploaded, it's a slick entry point.
Uploading the video
Following the big blue 'upload a video' button gets you to a page where you get just a few rules (no advertisements, for example), some suggestions for encoding and the 'choose a file to upload' action.
I found the compression tips particularly helpful for getting the best quality video, as the first few attempts to export from iMovie had yielded shoddy results. Having those tips right there was a huge time saver for me, but probably cost Vimeo only a couple of hours work.
The video is picked, and then uploaded, compressed and displayed, and you are kept up to date throughout the process with some smart messages. When I uploaded there was a queue of about an hour for this to finish.
You can get the embed code right away though, so you can keep working while waiting for the video to be ready, and anyone who sees the video before then is informed that is is coming.
Watching the statistics
Having posted the video on our Email Standards Project page, I could watch the view count rise, and see the referrers being tracked when logged in to Vimeo.
The entire process probably took 10 minutes of actual effort, plus an hour or so of waiting which presumably is not always needed, but in terms of mental effort it was truly simple.
As a web application experience, Vimeo is doing things right. I have not had a lot of experience to compare it with, but I see no need to try other services for this kind of video. Highly recommended.
