@Ari: I'm glad to see YouTube's refreshed their documentation on the matter. Alas, I spotted an error ("1290 x 720") and wish there was an easy way to contact them from that page.

@thaumata: Definitely could use more clarity, I agree. I got asked about the vidtuts before and I said I both made the content and I work for Linden Lab, and they were fine with that. They also mentioned that it wasn't "raw gameplay footage" soooo… I let it be.

Have you talked to anyone at Vimeo about this? Some of their staff like Soxiam and Blake have been VERY responsive to me (unlike their YouTube counterparts).

@Vlad: Have you tried TubeMogul yet for uploading to multiple sites?

blip.tv makes it hard to form communities, the navigation is lacking. I concur about YouTube comment culture.

Thanx for the YouTube and Vimeo comparison, that's really helpful! It also makes it less compelling for me to go to Vimeo Plus.

I should also add: "High (2-pass encoding) video quality" may not be working 100% reliable at Vimeo, according to: http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:9607

Vimeo has a great community of creative, supportive users – better than any other video hosting site I have tried. Stark contrast to YouTube which is plagued with negative, moronic comment Trolls. No community to speak of at Blip.tv, at least not one that I have noticed.

I like the Vimeo player, too. In fact their whole setup is very well done. The site is easy to use, easy on the eyes, and the community features (Contacts, Likes, Subscribe, etc.) are very well designed.

YouTube's new HD option is actually very nice – even sharper than Vimeo's. I recently got a HD video camera and have uploaded a few tests to both Vimeo and YouTube. The vids on YouTube are nice and smooth with fewer compression artifacts. Here's a couple of comparison screenshots:

http://www.shiny-life.com/pics/YouTubeVimeoCompare1.png
http://www.shiny-life.com/pics/YouTubeVimeoCompare2.png

And links to the same video on both sites:

http://vimeo.com/2581767
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBfp1C4AHuQ

Hard to think of YouTube as having high quality vids. Not enough of a difference to make me abandon Vimeo, but it's a nice alternative option.

But I feel like they could be slightly more clear in their policies about what is and is not allowed on their site. They say Vimeo is for personal use only, but then go on to say, "Users uploading popular or professional content should add their role and involvement in the video description and on their profile to avoid accidental deletion."

So I guess you can upload professional stuff, even though it's against the rules? They should clarify. I mean, they say businesses cannot promote themselves AT ALL on the site, but writers can promote their books, musicians can promote their music and etc. With this in mind, I'm kind of surprised they wouldn't hassle you about hosting your vid tuts there.

The other thing that SLers in particular should be wary of with Vimeo is that it wasn't that long ago that they tightened their policy on game-play caps. They said that they were just deleting videos from people playing things like WoW, but they've never really been clear about SL captures. Their upload rules state that you can have machinima, IF it has a story line, and that you must be very clear to label it as such or they will delete it.

I often capture scenes of things I've built in SL, or long-photo kind of things that I'd share on flickr, and I'd love to put them into Vimeo, but I think that without a plot, they might not qualify, and I would hate to build up a library of my creations there only to arrive to my account one day to find the art police have deemed it unworthy.

Just my two cents.

And now that they are allowing HD content – I'll start uploading HD content. true HD content – not HD-converted-to-SD content.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=132460&topic=16621