Why I Love Vimeo
My good friend Brian sent me a link to his demo reel yesterday, which he uploaded to Vimeo. I’d never heard of it before, but I was impressed with the site.
The most obvious reason to fall in love with Vimeo is the quality of the videos they are serving up. Default quality looks leaps and bounds better than YouTube’s video, but the really great part is that they offer HD video in full 720p. The quality is really amazing. For Brian, this was a no brainer — after all, who wants their demo reel to be viewed in a super compressed low quality format?
Brian used Vimeo to make himself look better, and I decided we should too. We already had YouTube search integration in our upcoming product, so I decided to take a look at Vimeo’s API and integrate some results from their site too. It only took about an hour to get everything hooked up and working, using the same system we had already built for YouTube, and the higher quality video really does make our app look better.
Since we were going for quality, we wanted to highlight the search results that came from an HD source. Unfortunately, there was no way to determine whether or not a video was HD with the current API. I decided to send an e-mail to the contact listed on the developer pages, Ted Roden. Within minutes, Ted had responded saying that he thought having an HD flag in the response was a great idea, and first thing the next morning, I had a message in my inbox explaining how the new information worked.
But the story doesn’t end there. A few hours later, after realizing how long our searches were taking, I fired off another e-mail to Ted asking for a few tips to speed things up. You see, the design of their API was such that search results only contained a video id, and a separate call was needed to get the full information for each video object. On top of that, yet another call was needed for thumbnails, and since we use two, that was 3 calls per search result. Needless to say, the overhead from all those requests added up pretty quickly, so I wanted to know if there was another way to get the same job done. Ted responded and asked what information I needed in the search results to do what I was doing, and I let him know. An hour later, he posted this to the Vimeo forums, and sent me a message letting me know that the search results could now return all the information about every video object in one call. The average time for one of our searches was sped up by an order of magnitude!
And so I just want to highlight the excellent support I received from Vimeo, and Ted. Sometimes startups can be really amazing to work with.