I love vimeo. As a film maker, I find their video quality and user experience much better than youtube. You can find a lot of interesting short movies made with excellent production values on the site. Slate has a nice profile on them today.
About 73 million people visit YouTube every month, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete. Vimeo gets just a tiny fraction of that horde, fewer than 3 million. But the content looks like it comes from the Web’s most talented lot. Vimeo attracts a high-art, film-buff set—the kind of people who, when making movies for the Web, pause to consider such virtues as cinematography, framing, music, and composition. You could argue that those concepts don’t matter much in the digital world, at least as far as page views are concerned; some of the most popular videos ever to wash up on the shores of the Web—”Numa Numa,” Laughing Baby, “Evolution of Dance“—were shot on cheap cameras in uncertain light and are blighted by poor sound. But that’s precisely why watching Vimeo is a revelation. The videos here suggest that there is a market on the Web for good old-fashioned quality.
Vimeo was founded in the fall of 2004 by filmmaker and Web entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, who was among the crew of young men who also started two other great collections of online fun, CollegeHumor and BustedTees. YouTube launched a few months later but took off immediately on the strength of user-generated viral hits and a smorgasbord of copyrighted clips from TV shows and movies. YouTube, which is now owned by Google and has been sued by Hollywood, has since instituted much stricter rules on the kinds of videos allowed on the site, but Vimeo’s guidelines are even less permissive. Vimeo lets you post only videos that you’ve created yourself; it won’t even let you post screen captures from your greatest video-game victories. YouTube allows studios to post movie trailers or clips from TV shows while Vimeo prohibits such commercial videos. Vimeo makes money through ads it posts on the site—though never on the videos—and from a $60-a-year subscription program for people who want to upload more than 500 MB of video files per week. (Vimeo declined to say whether it’s profitable; the site’s traffic, though, has increased by nearly 700 percent during the last year.)
For many years, Vimeo, like other video sites, languished in obscurity under YouTube’s shadow. In 2006, Barry Diller’s Internet conglomerate IAC purchased a controlling stake in CollegeHumor, BustedTees, and Vimeo; Lodwick and the company didn’t see eye to eye, and in late 2007, IAC fired him. Around that time, Vimeo launched its high-definition service, making it the first big site to offer filmmakers a chance to stream videos that didn’t look as if they were shot on a cell phone. Vimeo’s timing was just right; high-def cameras were just starting to become more widely available, and people looking for an alternative to YouTube’s grainy ghetto began to flock to Vimeo. “We refused to believe that video quality online couldn’t be amazing,” says Blake Whitman, a community director at Vimeo. “We thought that HD was the future, and we knew it was technically possible—and we got some really incredible filmmakers, motion graphics artists, and animators who were looking for the highest-quality site out there.”
In particular, Vimeo began to attract photographers who wanted to stream the sort of footage that wouldn’t really work on YouTube. Here’s a shining example: On the first warm-weather weekend of 2008, Keith Loutit, a photographer in Australia, planted himself on the ridges overlooking Tamarama Beach, in Sydney. His high-def camera was outfitted with a series of tilt-shift lenses, which produce a shallow depth of field, making a scene resemble a miniature town. The result is an enchanting landscape that one can watch several times over. (Loutit has made several other videos in this style.)
Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.