Wednesday, September 28, 2011

YouTube vs. Vimeo

I just posted a couple of new videos on YouTube, Vintage Reduced Shakespeare Company stuff. One is a bit of footage from 1986 featuring the rarely-performed Encores to Romeo and Juliet during the period that it was a standalone pass-the-hat act. The other is a 5 minute preview of the 90 minute Reduced Shakespeare Company 30th Anniversary Retrospective.

The Retrospective itself, though, is not on YouTube. Why? Simply put, because it's ninety minutes long. Increasingly, filmmakers are using other hosting services to showcase their long form videos, rather than breaking it into parts to accommodate YouTube's 15-minute limit on videos.  And Vimeo is awesome. Not only does it allow bigger files and longer videos, but it allows you to change your video after it's published -- without losing comments, likes and page views. And it seems to handle more formats and codecs than without the sync problems that often afflict YouTube.

Seems to me that YouTube is losing customers, and page views, by not offering an upgraded hosting plan to allow for long-form videos. Right?