Someone really needs to compete with YouTube. I really hoped Vimeo could do it, since they actually have a pretty decent HTML5 player, but it doesn't seem to be happening.
For music (ie, audio only), SoundCloud is very popular. 120 minutes free, more storage and features as you pay more. It's a bad fit for podcasters, though.
For video, I don't really see anything wrong with Vimeo aside from its lack of critical mass. YouTube still has 99% of the content you want.
If you want to share film of yourself lighting farts, you put it on youtube.
Whereas if you want to make an detailed animation about philosophy's relationship to the colour blue, then you put it on vimeo, and if it is any good then someone else will put a badly transcoded version of it on youtube, which is where most people will watch it.
If Vimeo (or some other site) became a serious competitor to YouTube is there any reason to expect that they'd be any less deferential to the labels than YouTube is?
I'd say no, because I'd expect the labels to keep throwing lawsuits at a serious YouTube competitor until they were. Moreover, the labels have a new piece of ammunition they didn't have against YouTube: YouTube meets our requirements, why can't you?
re the decent player aspect: I've given up on Vimeo.
I use Firefox with the usual privacy plugins: NoScript, RequestPolicy, AdBlockPlus, and Ghostery. No matter how I configure the settings, including disabling all of them, I can't get Vimeo player to work.
