Vimeo launched a mobile version of their site Wednesday, allowing iPhone and Android users to stream their videos via their mobile browsers. This means transcoding their videos into a format other than Flash, since only the Hero (and, of course, the Droid Eris) support Flash out of the box. They appear to be using Quicktime to encode the videos.
Currently, the number of videos that have been converted is limited to videos picked by Vimeo’s staff, but that will be expanding soon. Blake Whitman, Vimeo’s Director of Community, told CNet: “In the future, like the next several weeks–maybe longer, we’ll be offering Plus users the option to transcode their videos to an iPhone version too.”
In an unscientific test, video quality was excellent, and seemed to be higher-resolution than the mobile version of YouTube – at least on an iPhone 3G. Videos loaded and buffered quickly, and on AT&T’s admittedly pitiful 3G network, the video never got ahead of the buffered stream, even on longer videos.
This is definitely good news. Competition is good, and providing mobile video is an excellent way for Vimeo to increase their exposure. They have a lot of catching up to do. So point your ‘Droid’s browser to http://www.vimeo.com/m to check it out!
