I've used almost every video-sharing site out there. I'm happy that's not an exaggeration, because my many hours spent can save you time — above all, combine my trusted experience with your best judgment. The following is subject to change as certain services get better (and others become worse, I'm sure), but it'll hopefully be a great convenience.
Without further ado…
"Big picture" tools
TubeMogul
Not a video-sharing site in itself, this is a highly useful utility which uploads to over a dozen of the most popular sites (they don't do Flickr and are having "site issues" with Vimeo right now). Another plus: stats tracking. I use it regularly, it saves me a lot of trouble. Also a pragmatic way to become better informed by examining video quality uploaded to multiple sites. Free accounts get 150 deployments/month, e.g., uploading 2 video to 4 sites each counts as 8 deployments. My advice is to check the numbers and see where you're getting (or growing) the most views, and focus on those.
VodPod
A meta-video-sharing site. You setup a pod and "collect" videos from just about any other video site, including those listed below. Main benefit for me is ease of organizing and adding tags and descriptions atop what other sites give you. Perhaps generally more useful for passionate viewers than video creators themselves, yet I'm both. Extremely helpful guys run this (a core team of Lindens, including me, are currently working with them on a project). Use this if you find your online video collection too scattered, and see what I'm doing with it.
Best-to-worst quality
Vimeo
Very high quality, higher in most cases than blip.tv (and it supports HD). Extremely elegant site design, Web 2.0-slick. Limits you to 500 MB/week (premium accounts are supposedly coming soon) and no batch uploader. But like me, you can open multiple tabs in your web browser and upload several videos at once. (Not as good, but it works.). The best thumbnail-picker (lots of choices, a snap to use). What's missing? Not raw gameplay footage-friendly (see their policy and forum threads).
blip.tv
My current preference for uploading Second Life video tutorials (I'm swaying towards Vimeo but lack of batching holds me back). Great quality, very crisp text at small sizes. Sound is a bit swishy. UpperBlip batch uploader is rudimentary but functional, better than YT's. Support is helpful, tho I've gotten mixed responsiveness (sometimes it's superb, other times "…"). blip.tv's search isn't as good as YouTube, and you can't restrict searches to your own videos. Has the most extensive player customization I've seen yet, but Vimeo's UI is more intuitive.
Flickr
Very convenient if you already use it for photo-sharing. Videos are easy to tag and search, per Flickr tradition. Quality is better than YouTube but falls behind blip.tv and Vimeo, with noticeable visual blockiness for fast-motion clips. Audio has annoying swishy artifacts. Uploads are often unreliable, failing mysteriously — but uploading the same file several seconds later will work. Biggest downside? Videos can only be almost-90 seconds long. I say almost because they do truncate a bit off the end. Overall, not bad. But not great either.
YouTube
The most popular by far. If you want plenty of views and exposure amidst the slings and arrows of spam and dumbass comments, there's no alternative. Quality stinks compared to others (visuals are pixelated and sound is mono), and "high-quality" mode is only available for (1) certain videos (it doesn't tell you why) and (2) doesn't work for embedded videos offsite. Which effectively cripples its broad usefulness. Support sucks and the forum users are more helpful than the cluelessness of official staff. Has batch uploader, but it's kind of buggy, and right now, my connections are timing out. One special positive: you can skip ahead in its video player without waiting for the progress bar to buffer beforehand. Wish others had this feature.
Others
WeGame
In a category of its own. Unlike blip.tv and Vimeo, WeGame is friendly towards and all about gaming videos. Site is simple to use and they have numerous sections, including a Second Life one. Big draw: they created their own game recorder program which is cheap (free) and cheerful (simplest way to record and upload I've seen yet). Quality is decent and you can also link to your YouTube videos.
And…
There are many more specialized video-sharing sites arising, and the ones that hope to stand out most emphasize a unique twist, whether it's advertising submission length as a strength, or focusing on how-tos (OneMinuteU and 5min fulfill both). Beyond this, the appeal of some sites is not just in showing off your video, but joining a community of likeminded people.
Quality shoot-out
Videos are worth a few 1,000 words, at least — here's the same clip, as featured in "Getting a Second Life Just Got Easier with Direct SLurl", uploaded to 3 sites.
Vimeo
blip.tv
YouTube
You know which I like best. What's your fave?
Conclusion
Short story of the brief roundup: go with TubeMogul to spread your video shrapnel, add VodPod if you're a rabid viewer who wants to keep tabs across multiple sites, and learn firsthand what the others contribute to your multimedia life online.
As Bruce Lee said:
"Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own."
Context: I mainly upload Second Life video tutorials and machinima, with a smattering of some "real life" stuff too. My videos often include hyperkinetic motion, lots of colors, and humor.
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I agree Vimeo is the best,
why is not catching on ?
For HD video nothing beats Vimeo, but for SD video I'm gonna have to go with blip.tv for sharpness. I was rather disappointed in how compressed a video I uploaded to Vimeo at 848×480 was compared to the HD videos I've uploaded, you'd think they could use some sort of more adaptive codec to keep the quality consistent between all sizes.
Love the new site, Torley.
Sad news though… it seems that Vimeo is taking the position that they no longer want machinima: http://www.vimeo.com/forums/topic:6848
Thanks for the reminder about TubeMogul. I'm gonna go check it out right now before I forget again.
Vimeo is an awesome place to share videos. The community their is very creative and supportive. They also require that that you be involved in the creation of any uploaded videos, so you'll find much less recycled YouTube garbage.
Their new stance on game footage is a bit vague, though. They no longer welcome in-game footage but say that machinima is acceptable. The line between the two is a bit fuzzy.
Here's a link to the blog post where they announced these changes. http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140
"Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game."
"We are not, at this time, banning films that fall into the Machinima genre."
I'm a fan of Revver currently. Also because it displays ads for all users, so I get to earn a few cents from my work. There are other sites that offer ads (I've seen it on YouTube too), but only for special Premium users and they only start paying once you reach 10,000 views or so.
In addition, Revver offers a Quicktime download of files. And although there's still a lot of crap, the videos are all original, as they're reviewed on upload, making sure no copyrights are violated. This makes it not a gameplay-friendly place though. Also user-created fan music videos can't be uploaded (music copyright obviously).
Embedded players are fully customizable (and resizable), even the Revver logo can be replaced by a custom logo.
The downside is it can take a while before your vid is online, my latest one spent a day or so processing.
I've uploaded a few videos to YouTube and they all have the "high quality" link and those videos are much better than the "normal" video. I think it has to do with the fact I save my videos as HD MPEG-2 720p, they end up being fairly decent quality. The raw footage I take in Fraps and I use Cyberlink PowerDirector to stitch them all together.
My only issue with YouTube is that the upload is problematic for me, sometimes I have to try several times before it takes.
@Alan: Several reasons, possibly. One has to do with time: YouTube was among the first, and to this day, has so many options to share (spread) its content abroad.
@Kevin: Have a link to that disappointing vid?
@Bettina: Thanks, and it sounds more like they don't want raw gameplay footage, but machinima (edited and likely having a narrative) is alright. As Vlad mentioned.
@Daed: I heard good things about Revver before but aside from advertising, haven't found a clear reason to get more into it.
Hi Torley,
I forgot to mention that dailymotion.com seems to have improved its quality quite a bit.
How about ways to stream into SL? I know Blip.tv and Veodia.com can send out to SL, and then there's the iffy high quality mode in YouTube. But what about streaming live into SL? I have already used a web cam to film RL into SL with Veodia, but do you know of anyway to stream a video file live to people in SL? As in, when several people come in and click play on their media tabs at different times, they will all see the same part of the movie rather than all starting at the beginning.
@Alan: Thanks for the followup!
@Neko: I've seen some hacky means with Darwin server. I don't know of a really elegant, easy-to-setup way that people can do in a few minutes… yet. I'd suggest asking gurus in this area, like the http://metaverse-tv.com team!
I should add now this page is linked from the Movie help page on the wiki, because Revver shows ads on your vids and you can make money off it, it is commercial usage. There's an important notice about this on previously mentioned wiki page: you'll need to contact LL and the creators of stuff you filmed and get their permission.
Revver can (and prob will) deny your vid if you can't show them you have the perms from above mentioned company and people.
BrightCove is quite good, but too bad, we can't directly upload videos from the site anymore, instead we have to buy the whatevertheyoffered. What a waste.
@FionaChan: Yes, that turned me off awhile ago, and I couldn't find a compelling advantage to use it.
@Daedalus: Belated thanks for the updated, but good to be aware.
Hey Torley, yeah currently, Darwin Streaming Server (Windows) and Quicktime streaming server (mac) are the only ways to stream live into SL at the moment. These are just relays, you also need a live broadcasting program like Wirecast (google it) which takes some learning curve and I believe there are other broadcasting software out there, but may not be as popular. But we wait for the day when Flash is enabled in SL and that is when you will see some good stuff come from us.