C’mon Vimeo, don’t be like that.

A friend was asking the other day about whether Vimeo was worth recommending to clients after they yanked down another clip (the Nike World Cup spot that, save for the clueless, most everyone dug). I’m not sure though. At first Vimeo was like this up and coming cool vid site that let anyone post. The quality of the content seemed better than YouTube’s Wild West mob mentality, and Vimeo’s Flickr-like community watch seemed to be partly responsible for that. It seems though like they’re building something like what Current TV has with specific categories of original content.

Not a bad approach, and it does weed out the shit. The above being just one example of cool clips from their HD timelapse section. No shaky cell phone video work here. Ironically, someone in an agency will be using Vimeo for inspiration in much the same way they use YouTube. I could see them “borrowing” this sequence for a commercial.* Something though feels lost when a Nike clip can remain on YouTube but be yanked from Vimeo just for linking to it.

(Update: A community manager from Vimeo responded offline that posting videos you didn’t have a hand in creating is verbotten. Okay, I can see that. I know it’s likely a competition thing, but the users don’t care about that. People post on more than one platform, so maybe both sites could at least integrate user IDs and give people the option to simultaneously post the way Posterous allows users to. Both vid sites get the cred for the view. Just an idea. But props to Vimeo for responding. No site/platform that I've ever mentioned here has responded in the past.)


*No, not the Sprint work which itself was a rip from a British filmmaker, smartass.