Vimeo HD, Brought to You by BitGravity
Vimeo is getting a ton of press, including a mention in the New York Post for offering online video content in HD quality. The Post loves it, so do content producers, but do most end-users have the patience to view a bitrate 4x the “industry standard?“
UPDATE: See Jakob’s comment below, the Post column was incorrect to begin with. That said, HD video generally requires more than 4x Vimeo’s standard bitrate of 400k. Vimeo’s HD FAQ recommends a bitrate of 3,000k-5,000k.
On my wireless connection at home the video does look great, but the progressive download takes a bit longer than your average video to progress, and Alley Insider is skeptical of the value proposition, as am I.
This is a gimmick, made possible by IAC’s deep pockets and BitGravity’s next generation CDN.
It’s a cool gimmick to be sure, but don’t expect everyone to jump on the HD bandwagon quite yet. It still costs more money, most people don’t have 2Gbps downstream connections, and until the monetization question is solved it doesn’t make sense to adopt.
October 17th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
The numbers are off. I don’t know where “4x the bitrate” comes from. The Post said we have 4x the detail, but that was inaccurate: 1280×720 is *twelve*, not four times the image detail. Further, 12x the number of pixels does not mean 12x the bitrate.
BUT. The bottom line is that low quality web video is far from pushing the limits of a normal high-speed internet connection. So our HD actually plays almost instantly on many connections.
And btw: by definition, you can reduce almost any new technology to “a gimmick”.
October 21st, 2007 at 1:00 pm
[...] from Michel Fortin [...]