Viddyou, a video sharing site that launched almost a year ago as a platform for video bloggers, today rolls out support for high definition video and adds a $35/yr premium membership option for power users.
On the surface, Viddyou looks like many of the other video sites out there. But it has so far managed to foster a community that seeks refuge from the masses over at YouTube. Co-founder Aaron Wadler says that Viddyou’s contributers enjoy the site’s extensive privacy controls and lack of both advertisements and trolls. It’s a place where they feel comfortable sharing videos of their children and grandparents, or posting more personal video blogs for and about their friends.
Today’s additions are meant to continue that focus on quality over quantity. The high definition video comes in both 720p and 1080p, a first for video sharing sites we’re told (Vimeo provides only 720p). Both look great to the untrained eye, and 1080p might be too processor intensive for most computers anyway. We’ve embedded a 720p video from Viddyou below since 1080p would probably chug and skip for many readers.
ViddYou users who want to upload in HD will need to pay for the premium membership, which will also let them download copies of their videos and upload videos of unlimited length (the free version only allows 5 minutes each).
Competitors include Motionbox, Vimeo, and Mydeo, three other services that focus on video sharing for friends and family.
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Is it me or is that logo a phallis squirting out a star? Or a phallis that is in pain (i.e. star(s) hover(ing) about its head as in a cartoon)?
And don’t get me started on that name.
Harry “perv with the swerve” Wang
The porn industry is soooo far ahead of the curve for video sites….
Horrible name, horrible logo. But an interesting site nonetheless.
Awesome site. Finally a HD online solution. Definitely worth the money.
great site…but on the site they say they do Full HD (1080p)
@1: I’ve known Aaron for a while and used the site since before it was launched, and I NEVER thought to read that into the logo. Now you’ve spoiled it for me. Thanks a lot. Jerk.
Provided your mind is in the right place, I think it’s a great logo. It’s a REAL logo, not like a lot of other sites with logos consisting of asterixes and other common symbols and doodads.
Cool site, too. I haven’t had a lot of time to poke around the new version, though.
Mark,
You should list Vimeo as a competitor, they have been doing HD for quite a while.
I checked out Viddyou. Looks like they’re just copying Vimeo from what I can see. Not sure what the value proposition is in charging for the same thing that someone else is giving away free.
Also Viddyou is serving their video from Amazon S3, not a CDN, which is ok if you’re on the west coast but i wonder how good the performance will be from elsewhere?
Aaron has lost his innocence,
HD? Maybe a slightly higher bit rate than YouTube but not exactly HD. Seems the HD label is getting thrown on everything these days with little regard for what it actually means.
I’ve been a fan of Vimeo for a long time, but their 500MB weekly upload limit sucks, and they don’t do 1080. Might give these guys a try, it’s only $10 more than what I pay for Flickr now and it looks like this offers a lot. Thanks for the tip mark!
@Mike:
1080 is an answer to a question no one is asking. I’m running a 2.4Ghz imac and 16mbps comcast connection, and it stutters like crazy. It also buffers a lot, which makes me wonder if S3 is capable of delivering the video fast enough. If I can’t run it on my setup, most other people can’t either.
@Ridonculous:
You need to hit the full-screen button. They are using a small player so you can’t really see the full resolution there. Hit full-screen and it looks really good.
I’m seeing a lot of artifacts at full screen. Are you sure this HD???
This site gets crushed when - Youtube does HD.
- This company has no moat to protect their business model
The “HD” term is being thrown around a little too liberally these days. They say they do 720p and 1080p, neither of which is exactly true. The resolution of the videos is still very small. They look way better than youtube, but they are not “HD” in any way. They should state the (correct) facts, which are - they allow you to upload HD clips, then they downsize them for the web.
The vast majority of home computers just aren’t able to process full HD without choppiness…it’s simply not practical if your friends and family are seeing your Caribbean vacation through robotic stutters. Full HD running at 30fps sounds great on paper, but the risk of alienating your audience isn’t worth it. Not yet. We’ll be there in a few years, so it’s good to see these sites leading the way (and Vimeo’s overall features and creative community still make it far and away my favorite video site).
@Steven:
You need to learn the difference between the size of the player (as rendered on the page) and the resolution of the video. The player size is set in the html code of the web page and is independent of the video resolution.
The player is small, yes, but if you expand it to full-screen you’ll see that it’s very high resolution. I don’t doubt their claim that their 720p is 720p.
I agree with @Steven, it ain’t HD. Technically, all of these video sharing sites use the same video plugin (Adobe) and *that* is the limitation. Compare the quality with what you see at abc.com and fox.com. Both use the same media player (from Move Networks).
@Harry: That’s not exactly what we had in mind when we were creating the logo, but I’m impressed with your interpretation.
@Nina: They were, until today. :]
@Jeff: We offer some things that Vimeo doesn’t. For instance you can record from a webcam, view videos on your iPhone, video replies, integration with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, 1080p HD, there’s absolutely no advertising, and no monthly cap on uploaded videos.
@Ridonculous: Our 720p videos have 10x the bitrate of a YouTube video, and 1080p videos are even higher. We also use a different codec (VP6-S vs. YouTube’s h.263) which yields even higher visual results. Viddyou HD is the real deal.
@Jeff: You’re right, 1080 will need a newer computer (probably something with a dual core), but it plays fine on both my 2.4 MacBook Pro and my <$500 dual core Lenevo PC at my home on a 4MB residential Comcast connection, so it’s definitely doable at the consumer level.
I’m on a MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Santa Rosa running DVI->HDMI 720p HD projector with monitor spanning and data provided over a standard Comcast cable connection with no problems in playback.
Like all new technology it only gets better as the hardware gets better. Not all can play with HD yet, but for those that are leaders in pushing technology forward Viddyou’s offering is the best for consumer level personal video.
Viddyou is 100% real 1080p and 720p and http://vy-s307.viddyou.com/080.....917837.mov is the link to the 1080p clip I put together off a Canon HG10 if you want to see the original 1080p file…
Vimeo doesn’t offer HD embeds period. You *have* to view the HD content on-site. I suspect that’s due to sponsorships and advertising supported deals which isn’t part of the Viddyou model.
As always Aaron and I are very approachable and receptive to all feedback from the funny comments about star shooting phallic logos to the comments doubters and the lovers. No worries here.
Mark you owe me a new set of thighs - running this video on my laptop seems to have melted my previous set.
take a pronoun or anything else and add “-eo”….you now have a video startup…vimeo, mydeo, etc.
HAH, this site has NO users!!!!
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv
6K people last month… down from 140K high? PATHETIC!
Yes. At closer look, your video is 1280 x 720 at 30fps which would make it 720p30 and indeed HD but I’d guess you’re encoding at much less than 4mbps.
So it’s a big picture full of compression artifacts. This makes it work on everybody’s computer but it isn’t really HD quality given it has less real information in it than several common SD formats.
Comparing it to an HD trailer from Apple makes my point more clearly (e.g.: http://movies.apple.com/movies.....e_720p.mov).
Granted not everyone has the horsepower or bandwidth to watch Apple’s HD trailers but they use the HD name appropriately whereas in this case I think we are diluting its real meaning and value.
someone please point me to a resource that has costs associated with video streaming and pix (i.e. twitter and video twitter)…..
p.s. this HD video is really cool.
For clarification - I am not Aaron from Viddyou. I’m the Aaron who usually posts as Aaron on TC. I’ve known Viddyou Aaron since way before Viddyou.
@DaveS - Well, yeah, everyone has to start somewhere.
@23/Ridonculous - I believe that’s an unfair comparison. The common SD formats have a lot of information if they’re using their native compression, but then again miniDV footage cannot be streamed without significant processing (compression). Either way, you have to make sacrifices with streaming video, so it’s relative. Apple’s HD videos aren’t quite set up to stream - you just download it and if you can play it before it’s done downloading then you’re in luck.
(Technically, I think you’re getting a lot of compression in HD *anything*, unless you’re watching direct off of a BluRay disc or something. Uncompressed HD is HUGE - see how much space you need if you’re editing several hours of footage pulled from P2 cards, for instance.)
Arron ” Well, yeah, everyone has to start somewhere.”
They did… at 140K users! And dropped like a stone. That means their site is crap.
@DaveS - Third party web stats aren’t all that reliable with smaller sites. The spike is most likely thanks to initial coverage, but it probably wasn’t actually that big. Come on, you could attribute the huge discrepancy to changes in how Compete makes its estimates very easily, especially since their methods and sources have been getting bigger and better over the last year. I don’t know anything about Viddyou’s traffic numbers that isn’t public (haven’t asked, actually), but 140k to nearly nothing while a site is adding features and making everything better doesn’t make sense.
Aaron: everyone knows you work for this POS site. Just stop it already!
Holy geeze! That video looks great! I definitely think that something like this is the future of video on the web. Kudos to the team for coming up with a site that actually does something and is easy on the eyes too.
@DaveS - I know it’s not really gonna happen, but if you could compare IP addresses, which email addresses we’re using, etc., you’d find that I am not the same person as Aaron from Viddyou. I post in TC comments fairly frequently, and he doesn’t post here unless it’s directly relevant to what he does. I used to always link to startupism.com as my web site, but I’m not writing for it anymore so no use linking.
Anyway, I talked to Aaron about it, and the 160k number is complete bunk. Compete’s numbers are so off as to be nearly irrelevant.
This video will be unacceptably choppy for most viewers. HD just doesn’t work without adaptive bitrate streaming. Autobahn HD for Flash is free. Go and add it into your player and make your viewers happy.