Google has become this unwieldily beast that doesn't care how frustrated its users become, because it knows not enough of them will leave to have even the slightest dent in their revenue.
Vimeo is on par or ahead for artsy original content, but pretty much focuses only on that niche, so there aren't many music videos for popular music, tv show / movie clips, or any of the rest of the stuff you find on YouTube.
I would really like to see Vimeo become more popular. Their service is much cleaner and far less annoying. Although the recent discovery of Youtube Feather has me intrigued.
It's interesting, though. In Hollywood, Vimeo seems to be the default choice for professional work. Up and coming directors have their short films and reels up there. And there are some password-protected videos top pros use for work on very big name films.
It's because Vimeo decided fairly early on that they weren't going to be YouTube. They remove stuff like gameplay videos, which means no lets plays, but that also means no low quality lets plays.
Thus if you find a link to a video on Vimeo there's a good chance there's some semblance of quality. Especially if it's a gaming video, because they do allow machinimas. They fostered that artsy niche and in the process became something totally different from YouTube.
I'm assuming it's because hosting a video site is still a very costly venture and the fact that many content creators started on YouTube. Since the bulk of their views are on YouTube they aren't going to move, especially if their livelihoods are at stake. Also, the difference between YouTube and news sites is that the both the content and the and the aggregation is happening on the same site. That means that they are tied to each other which ties the user there as well.
> Why haven't more video sites emerged with a similar ethos?
Because if they touched commercial music or video at all (even by accident or if it's fair use), they'll be sued into oblivion and/or asked to implement the same level of "content protection" YouTube has today (effectively the same thing because a startup video site wouldn't have the resources for that). Remember, the only reason YouTube exists today in any sort of recognizable form is that they got together with Google's checkbook and Google's lawyers. That gave them the legal ammunition to force some kind of settlement (albeit a deeply flawed and problematic one, between ContentID and non-DMCA takedowns, among other things).
If a YouTube competitor is going to emerge, it's going to come from a big company. That's not impossible, but most (all?) of the likely candidates would bring their own (similar or different) serious flaws to the table. And even then they'd need to develop a "content protection" scheme roughly as good as YouTube's - which would take serious machine learning chops on top of everything else, whittling the list even further.
That was my issue. G+ isn't much of a hassel to me as I avoid it but its practically impossible to stop using youtube. From the another thread here are two semi-solutions for now: http://fixyt.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta,
Never really thought about it before but Google definitely has the video market locked. Vimeo, dailymotion, liveleak, et al don't even come close in terms of content.
My main issue is the things damn insistence on flash. I want my MacBook battery to last. My recent solution has been to enable developer mode, change user agent to iPad, and all is well. But why the hell does it just flat out refuse to play when you don't have flash installed - even though it can?
There's youtube-dl which supports a whole slew of video sites and updates really quickly when things break. This lets you download content locally, play it via your choice of player, and avoid a whole mass of embedded-browser-player issues. It's generally my preferred route for playing videos, though I'll generally preview a few minutes (or watch shorter ones entirely) in a browser.
The negative of non-Flash movies (YouTube has some) is that they auto-play. Few things annoy me faster than sound coming from a background tab. I generally close them immediately (I usually queue up stuff to look at).
How old is your Mac? Flash has hardware acceleration since 2010 or so.
And if you do have a Mac built in the last 4 years, you're not missing much by using Flash. Difference in CPU usage is negligible and I haven't used an in-browser HTML5 player that wasn't shitty compared to its Flash implementation.
A few months. I was about to tell you I haven't installed it due to benchmarks that show the great power drain - then I noticed that all coincide with the time period you mention. Its funny, I only have issues with YouTube, nothing else. Guess I can't justify not having it now!
