Vimeo, the video-sharing site that’s not YouTube, revealed a new look today and a whole list of new features and updates.
The first thing you notice is that all videos are now big and looking lovely. It’s like switching from Flickr to 500px, if you know what I mean. I like it.
In a move slightly resembling the recent YouTube relaunch, Vimeo now displays a stream of the latest videos from your contacts and groups on your landing page. It’s called My Feed. Right next to it is a new Activity tab, which will remind you what you’ve done, watched or liked recently – or what your contacts have. But I particularly like the new Discover tab, which I’ll be visiting often to see what others have created. Discovering new – curated or otherwise recommended – videos on the site has always been my favourite activity as as a viewer on Vimeo, so I’m glad this option has been made a bit more prominent.
Prolific uploaders will be pleased to know Vimeo now supports multiple file uploads, which in theory means you should be able to add several files to your upload queue simultaneously. I haven’t tested the feature yet, so the most important question still remains open: has the upload speed improved too? Last time I uploaded something it was painfully slow and I guess my broadband provider was only partly to blame. But the video below seems to suggest the process should be less painful now.
There are also new options for those who prefer to download rather than upload. As you may know, Vimeo creates several versions of the file you upload (including ones optimised for mobile devices), but until today if you wanted to download the video, you could only get the (in many cases gigantic) original file, provided the owner enabled downloads.
Now you can choose from four versions: a mobile file, a SD .MP4 file, an HD .MP4 file or you can download the original file. That should be pretty useful.
Vimeo is still working on the new look, so not all features are perfect, for example, my embed options were not available at the time of writing.
Regardless of all that, it’s still my favourite video sharing site and a brilliant source of inspiration. See here for the full list of new features.