Compare & Contrast the YouTube Alternatives

It's a running complaint from our clients. They love the ease and popularity of YouTube, but the video quality ain't great. So, I thought I'd find a few alternatives, upload a single high-quality video to each one - and see how they turn out.

Here's what I found. (I'd suggest hitting mute - and then playing all of 'em simultaneously.)

First, YouTube itself:

Second, MotionBox:

Third, vSocial:

Fourth, Blip.tv:

Click To Play

A few thoughts: It seems that the MotionBox video quality is roughly the same as YouTube's - plenty of compression artifacts and blurriness. The vSocial quality is great, but like MotionBox, there's lots of extra stuff in the player widget. Blip.tv has an excellent and uncluttered player widget - and when it's over, the screen just goes black.

It's worth noting that the original video file was 320x240, and only Blip.tv rendered its video in that size -- while the others all converted to their default larger size. Blip.tv has some relatively unique underlying HTML (based on javascript, rather than an EMBED tag) which might make it difficult to upload to some blogs or CMS's.

(Incidentally, you can download or view the original QuickTime file here for comparison purposes.)

Are there others that I've missed? I'm happy to try 'em out.