As a film­maker, I make a lot of fun short videos that I want to post to my blog and the omnipresent YouTube flash player has become too pedes­trian for me. It’s every­where, every­one has seen it, and I want my blog to look unique. Also, YouTube has recently imple­mented a new anti-piracy fea­ture that scans the audio in your video and com­pares it to a data­base of songs. Some­times, Youtube can mis­tak­enly tag your video as infring­ing on music even if it isn’t. Take for instance you film your friend and a car on the street has its radio too loud. Youtube can pick up on the song and poten­tially delete your video from its site. For those rea­sons and a few more, I decided to look for an alter­na­tive and found Vimeo wor­thy of giv­ing a try.

Like Youtube, Vimeo offers HD sup­port and pro­vides an ade­quate amount of stor­age space. But more impor­tantly in order to com­pete with YouTube’s dom­i­nance, Vimeo got all inno­v­a­tive with their fea­tures. Vimeo offers built in wid­gets that you can imple­ment in your blog or web­site. I’m really look­ing for­ward to play­ing with this one wid­get where it dis­plays all of my lat­est videos. I’m going to make a ded­i­cated videos page and use the wid­get as a visual gallery of my videos. In addi­tion, Vimeo gives me a per­sonal email that allows me to post videos by email. In con­junc­tion with the wid­get, I can update videos to my blog from the road. Vimeo also lets me spec­ify the size of the video so that I can embed the video with a size that fits the lay­out of my blog. Yes I can do this in Youtube with an easy alter­ation in html; but for peo­ple out there that don’t know html, this fea­ture is key. Lastly, Vimeo’s free account caps me at an ade­quate weekly limit of 500MB and 1 HD video per week.

The fol­low­ing is a test/example of Vimeo:

From the SNL comic duo Chris Par­nell and Andy Sam­berg that brought you Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box comes Jizz in My Pants.

This song par­ody …songody? …par­o­dong? This par­o­dong aired on Decem­ber 6, 2008 and although as funny if not more than the other two shorts, Jizz in My Pants still has not gained enough trac­tion to receive the title of “viral”. I would argue that this has to do with Hulu’s clamp­ing down on their videos being dis­trib­uted through YouTube. Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box did so much to bring buzz back to the long stale Sat­ur­day Night Live that if the execs over at NBC took their heads out of their asses for one minute, they’d real­ize that YouTube does more help than harm. I’m not even sure the above Hulu embed will still work by the time you guys are read­ing this. Hulu has been so incon­sis­tent with their video libraries it’s ridicu­lous, one week a clip is up the other week it’s gone. Now they’ve even pulled out from Boxee.

The whole viral phe­non­menon will not work if view­ers feel like they are being tricked by NBC into being pawns for NBC’s over­all mar­ket­ing strat­egy.  There is a cer­tain unspo­ken trust between sender and receiver; and as alruis­tic web denizens, we would rather not pass along unwanted adver­tiz­ing to friends who trust us to not lit­ter their inboxes with spam.