Enter YouTube

January 30, 2009 | David

GOLD is transferring some of our Standard Definition video streams from Vimeo to YouTube.

It boils down to this: we love Vimeo. It’s standard and high-def encoding quality is, I think, unmatched. And the community there is fantastic, talented and supportive of high-quality content. But the reality is they’re a small company, and the reliability (and speed) of their video streaming is just not as high as YouTube’s. Add that to YouTube’s newer, better-quality compression, their “high-quality” stream feature and 16x9 player, and the fact that, as our viewership continues to increase more and more people are commenting to me on the loading time of our videos, we’re changing our embed player for many of our standard definition videos from Vimeo to YouTube.

The links to our high-quality HD video will still link to Vimeo, whose HD quality is, IMHO, currently unmatched. In addition, some of our longer episodes (like Episode 1) are too long to be uploaded to YouTube, so those longer episodes will still be streamed from Vimeo. And all of our episodes will still be found on Vimeo, just as they can be found on Viddler, Blip, MetaCafe, etc.

For the end user, the transition will be seamless, save that YouTube streamed videos should load a lot faster. We’re constantly striving to deliver the best content and viewer experience here at GOLD, so we’ll be monitoring usage and quality and tweaking how things work in response to new technologies and circumstances. Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.

Thanks,

-David