Would be interesting to see some facts and figures.
The last time I looked (around a year ago) it was more expensive and a lot more hassle to do it yourself than to use a service like Vimeo.
Maybe that's changed?

1and1 will give you 150GB of space, with unlimited bandwidth for 7 bucks a month now. If you really want to pinch pennies can get 10GB of space from them, with unlimited bandwidth, for 4 bucks a month. 10 gigs is enough room for several hours of much higher quality video than you will get from any YouTube or Vimeo like service I know of, if you encode it properly. I don't know that it's really any tougher to encode a video for uploading to a service than for putting on your own space (if you know what you are doing).

I'm with Robert. You can't beat having complete control over the encoding. 1&1 is a great value and that's where I host most of my video.

Besides, virtually everyone here is violating Vimeo's TOS which specifically states: "Businesses may not use Vimeo to externalize their hosting costs. Vimeo (including Vimeo Plus) is not a business service." If you are using Vimeo primarily to avoid hosting your own videos, you are misusing the service, even if you've paid for it.

And, as has been pointed out before, you also normally surrender all copyright to them by uploading your films (check the small print in the Terms of Service of Vimeo et al).... No doubt about it, build your own website and rent a suitable hosting service so you can control everything from quality to access.

Absolutely false. See Vimeo Terms of Service -- they go out of their way to point this out:

It's not as simple as that. I use youtube and exposure room (free), and Akamai (very expensive!). I teach a college course in which we use the free services as well as http streaming.

I agree that controllable quality is essential for many professional applications. (Of course, the "acceptable quality" bar is being lowered for everyone, with the proliferation and acceptance of truely awful hand-held cellphone video on youtube.)

Although we don't have control of the quality that youtube or vimeo provide, isn't that quality predictable?

However, for truely pro applications, shouldn't we also be looking at true streaming, rather than http streaming or progressive download? True streaming (Windows Media Server, FVSS, Darwin, others) means that preplay buffer time is less, mid-stream pauses for buffering are fewer, there are no frame drops, and, on some servers, there can be auto-negotiation of the stream size per the bandwidth the user actually has available.

Taking control of the quality means more than controlling the codec, player, size, and bandwidth.

And, speaking of TOS, some http hosting services will cut you off if they think you're using too much bandwidth on a regular basis! Usually, by hosting videos that become too popular.

OK, I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification!

Andy was wrong in the fact that you do not surrender your copyright, but partially correct in the fact you do assign many rights to Vimeo, including the rights "to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, modify, incorporate into other works, publicly perform and display your videos or any portion thereof, in or through any medium, whether now known or hereafter created."

Pretty much, you're giving Vimeo carte blanche with regards to your video. At least those rights are completely revocable upon removing the video from Vimeo.

I'm no copyright lawyer, but, it was explained to me by a video hosting company that they need these rights assigned to them so as to cover them in case they're accused of infringing someone's copyright by transmitting the video I uploaded.

This allows them to respond "Seth uploaded this video, he said it was his, and gave us this license - your infringement complaint should go to him!"

Of course if they receive a complaint most hosts will take down the content, and should have an ownership resolution policy... but this sort of TOS/license is supposed to protect them from further liability from a user's potential copyright violations.

Don't we want them to "use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, modify, incorporate into other works, publicly perform and display your videos or any portion thereof, in or through any medium, whether now known or hereafter created." ???

Again, this isn't legal advice, this is what I remember from what was explained to me.

You obviously have more control over the quality of the videos on your own site but you’ll have less people viewing them. Plus with Vimeo for example, as long as you pay for a Plus Account, people can easily download the original source.

I’m not worried about the fine print and part of it allows them to convert the videos so technically you have to give them some rights or they wouldn’t be allowed to do that. I don’t think they would be that stupid and use a video in a way that would destroy the relationship with it’s users.

As clearly defined per the Vimeo TOS that I've linked to in a previous post, they do explain succinctly what's going on when you assign those rights to them -- be sure to read the "Vimeo Speak" in the blue bar column to the right of the TOS. The very act of encoding your video clip constitutes a modification and a derivative work. Showing your clip in their player is an example of how your video is incorporated into other works (the other works being the player that displays the clip). And your clip sits on multiple Vimeo servers, hence the "right to copy" clause. This is all laid out in very plain language and clearly there is nothing nefarious regarding the rights the you assign to Vimeo, which only lets them do what they're doing as a hosting service -- no hosting service can operate legally without the rights you're assigning per the limitations of the TOS. It's all very straightforward. I think those who are seeing "evil" in it perhaps have not read it clearly, specifically the right-hand column where Vimeo explains what's what in layman's terms.

This is very similar to the hooplah that occasionally surrounds Facebook and other social media platforms. When lawyers get in a room, they have a definition for what a platform provider needs rights for that is defendable in court. This is a different definition of 'rights' than what normal people think of when they think 'rights'. So the hooplah usually starts with regular folks getting up in arms over lawyerly definitions of rights, and all heck breaks loose on the blogs and forums with people demanding a fix. Then, to appease the masses, they have to provide a plain-English explanation and everybody settles down.

Like with Facebook. You have stuff you put on there and Facebook needs rights to show it. Often times you're using an application inside of which you add things, like maybe photos or comments etc. If you decide to close your Facebook account, some of those applications might retain what you added in there, because of the difficulty in easily removing it because third party application makers are involved. So Facebook needs to retain the right to still have some of our content on Facebook even if you leave Facebook. That doesn't make Facebook evil- it's just a very confusing scenario for most people because it's not only technologically technical, it is legally technical. So unless you're versed in both things, it all starts to sound very suspicious and nefarious when it's really not.

Vimeo Plus is a great convenience for those of us who use it and want its preferential treatment. For example, the new long awaited mobile functionality is coming to Plus members first. And when you upload a video, it is processed first. Etc. That's worth money to me. And generally, the Vimeo people are a nice, fun group, that interacts with their users quite a bit.

And one of the real values of something like Vimeo instead of just putting it on your own servers, is that the social networking aspect of it can be really beneficial to some.

My only complaint about them is that even the fastest computers sometimes stutter on playback. But I've experienced that with a lot of HD web videos. Only Youtube seems to go smoothly but their quality, even at HD, is still poopy- and lately, I feel like their streaming has really gotten slow (and I have reliably 13-15 megabit internet).

There are a bunch of ways to look at these services - as user generated content, as losing some control of our video, as easing the development of encoding, hosting, and embedding a player, etc.

This is an important point that Imran brings up here. These services are also a conduit to an audience - this could mean marketing products or services, persuading others to support a cause you believe in, establishing credibility, building an affinity group, and more. There's an incredible diversity of uses all kinds of people and companies are finding for social media sites.

I put together some clips I shot with a Canon HV20, that I'm selling on eBay, compressed it with x264, and put it on my web space with 1and1 (so folks could see what the camera is capable of before bidding on it). I compressed it to an average bitrate of 1750Kbps (with 48Kbps AAC audio - Nero's encoder). It occurred to me that the footage I uploaded would be good for comparing the quality with what Vimeo and YouTube would do with the same thing (since the bitrate I encoded the version for my webspace at, is in the same ballpark of the bitrates used by those services when encoding 720p24 source), so I uploaded a much higher quality version to both services (if you login to Vimeo, you can download a copy of the version I uploaded to both services - 7Mbps video with 256Kbps audio). You can take a look for yourself, to see the differences:

YouTube version - YouTube - RobertMWright's Channel

Vimeo version -
My version - Canon HV20 Footage

Vimeo (not Plus) versus Exposure Room versus YouTube
 

If this direction for this thread interests people see the thread below - where I put the same 720p25 H.264 file (.mov) on Vimeo (not Plus though), Exposure Room and YouTube. Another example enabling direct comparison of the totally free offerings from each of these 3 video hosts. (Also, note the copyright comment in the linked thread has now been commented on in this one).

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/flash-we...vimeo-way.html