An appeal to web producers (and a rant)

When you produce a developer screencast or record a local developer meetup, conference, speech, please spare a momemt to give consideration to hosting. It is not out of the realms of possibility that the end result - the video - will be viewed in dozens of countries, with varying levels of bandwidth, across a range of operating system, display profiles and even different devices, some people might watch some today, some tomorrow, some people might download it for the flight ahead etc..

So please for the love of God, do not use Vimeo or Blip or other niche video site.

YouTube is fine!! Understood?

Why not Vimeo? All others developer celebrities use it?

To me it seems there is a sheep factor following with Vimeo, it is essentially a crappy off the shelf flash video player, pulling video from their akamai CDN account, with various little tricks in place to prevent you downloading the video. Most annoyingly, you cant skip the video until its downloaded, you cant imagine how frustrating this in in low bandwidth when you mistakenly close the tab. If you want to watch the last 10 minutes of a presentation you have to wait until download, this might not be a problem for those watching from a coffee shop in Silicon Valley, but try South East Asia. This is VHS, without the fast forward. It sucks. Granted work started to improve this 7 years ago, and now the buggy HTML5 player is showing some promise (skip works some of the time), but for now stick with YouTube so we dont have to jump through hoops.

Why not blip.tv?

Poorer CDN and no player for most mobile devices, Blip for some crazy reason has started developing apps not for specific platform but for specific devices. But at least they got random access (skipping) in place. Works from Android tablet - nope - not invented here.

But YouTube is not cool? SomeRailsBlog, Skillsmatter, DevFanBoy1 etc.. have a paid Vimeo account - i should do the same!

Look YouTube is fine, if you want to send $50pa to Google you still can. If you worry about the youtube kids leaving childish comments then disable comments or embed the video into you site with disqus etc..

YouTube so great?

I can skip the video freely, on both the Flash and HTML5 player. No configuration or setting to change. I can disconnect from a wifi node and connect to annother, change IP, disable/enable proxy, and then Youtube videos picks up and carries on. Try this vimeo- #fail A fantastic CDN, probably the best in the world, I spot new unadvertised new edge nodes shooting up across the world every few months (e.g. TOT - Thailand). Free transcoding down to as low as 240p. Upload in HD and you video will have 3 or 4 rates, not just normal and HQ. No need to sign in. There exists a multitude of online downloaders, installable downloader, and even CLI downloader (see youtube-dl) that means I can save a video for the plane, train etc.. try finding one for Vimeo that works for more than a week.

But hey if your content is that important, DRM it and stick it behind a pay wall, not this shitty compromise