Should I Switch To YouTube As My Default Video Player?

For the past year, John Chow dot Com has used Vimeo as its default for embedded video. The main reason for doing this is Vimeo allows HD embedding while the other video services does not. I’m starting to see comments that say the Vimeo service runs very slow for some readers and they’ve asked me to switch to YouTube. I should note that all my videos are available on YouTube, I just choose to embed Vimeo on the blog because it’s in HD 720p by default. However, YouTube recently allowed viewers the ability to choose their resolution on videos embedded on a web page. The default is 320p but you can easily change it to 480p or 720p if the video was filmed in those resolutions.

From a marketing standpoint, it would be better to use YouTube as the default player. The video views racked up by Vimeo would go to YouTube and that will give the clip a much higher chance of being a YouTube featured video. The other advantage of switching to YouTube is it’s free. Vimeo cost $59.95 a year and they don’t allow commercial content.

What do you guys think? Should I switch to YouTube as the blog’s default video player or should I remain at Vimeo. Please vote and leave your comment. I’ve included a sample video from YouTube and Vimeo so you can see the difference in video quality.

[poll id=”5″]