Vimeo and Ooyala
 
Vimeo is a video sharing site that only allows user-created videos of a “friends and family” nature. Only user-created content can be uploaded – no movies, commercials, music videos.  
 
At DePaul have been starting to use Vimeo to post original videos. Our RealPlayer streaming server is cranky and old and hardly reliable. We found that Vimeo, which is Flash-based, is a much better alternative great alternative.  
 
I prefer Vimeo over YouTube for sharing original material 500%. There is absolutely no question.  It has better video quality and offers HD format, which has 12 times the resolution of YouTube. Viewers can also download the original file. The website is very uncluttered and the discussion boards aren’t yet full of comment spam.   You can embed the HTML code (like YouTube) without taking students directly to the site. You also are limited by size (250MB per week) not by minutes. 
 
My co-worker Rick Salisbury wrote a very nice blog post on different video-sharing websites. He rated Viddler the highest, but since Vimeo had the easiest interface to use, we decided to go with this for our faculty.
 
http://www.iddblog.org/?p=28
 
 
A Sample Embedded Video from Vimeo

 

 

Ooyala

 

The very same co-worker Rick gets all the credit for encouraging our department to investigate and trial a service started by ex-Googlers called Oolaya.  It is not a free option, but very cheap at $.08 per hour of video viewed.  It may eventually be what we use instead of our streaming server.   It allows users to upload video of any quality to any website in in most formats.  There are no limitations on file size or length. The best feature of Ooyala is the analytics.   You can see how many times a video is viewed completely, at what point students stopped watching the video, and how many unique views a video actually had.  I think this is very valuable information, given the rate at which video presentations, narrated PowerPoints and multimedia are being pushed out.  It would be interesting to know if your students are actually watching them all the way through.

 

A screencapture of the DePaul Ooyala Backlot Analytics (Our Demo Account)

 

 

 


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