Youtube vs. Hulu vs. Vimeo - Lab Assignment #7

For this assignment, I was asked to view the functionality of 3 different video-streaming websites and review the functionality for each one.
Note: all three websites had an easy-to-embed code that I just clicked on to provide me with the necessary html.

youtube (www.youtube.com): You can upload your own videos easily, but the resolution is poor (especially in full screen mode) and there is also a time limit - if you want to watch a full episode of a TV show, you have to watch it in sections. The videos, though they did not do so this time, tend to buffer a lot and I normally find myself having to let them load all the way to prevent the player from stopping in the middle of each video. There are also advertisements at the bottom of the stream, which you can exit out of while watching, but it is definitely a pain. Youtube, for me, is easiest to use, especially because if I'm Googling something specific, the videos come from youtube.

hulu (www.hulu.com): The resolution is better because the video is set up in a widescreen format (however, this makes it awkward to embed). The sound quality sounds less grainy and the streaming overall is much better. You can watch full length shows or movies, but there are ads about every ten minutes that you have to sit through, much like television commercials, in order to move on with the video. There is also the option of completing an advertising survey in exchange for watching the video uninterrupted. I like using hulu on occasion because it's easy to watch full episodes of TV shows, but I get annoyed by the ads a lot.

vimeo (www.vimeo.com) : The resolution and sound quality of the videos doesn't seem to be as good as other websites on some videos, but there is better resolution on others - I suppose it just depends on who posts it. I had to wait for about 30 seconds for the video to load, but it played consistently once it loaded. There also were not ads or annoying pop-ups in the video, so it was nice to watch something in a much cleaner format. Vimeo, however, is very limited in the number of videos it has; there are few shows or popular videos - I found a lot of user-created posts.

The bottle from Gwaihirium on Vimeo.