vimeo-on-iphone

So the iPhone doesn’t support Flash. Most of the major Internet video sites run on Flash video. The iPhone is becoming the (if it hasn’t already become) leading smartphone in the market and a major platform for viewing content on the Internet. You can see the predicament this places video sites like Vimeo in. YouTube took the position quite a while back and re-encoded all of it’s video to H.264 to make them iPhone compatible. Now it looks like Vimeo is going to do the same.

Josh Lowenshon at CNET reports that Vimeo will begin by making things like staff picks and the HD video showcase available for iPhones. Then Vimeo iPhone support will come for Vimeo Plus users. This will be a great addition for filmmakers as Vimeo feels much more like the hangout and screening site for more serious filmmakers on the Internet these days. Sure YouTube has many, many more videos and many, many more page views but the quality of the work on Vimeo is, IMHO, much higher. Let’s hope Vimeo gets all of their videos ported to work on the iPhone even for those without a Plus account (and I should mention that Android support is coming as well) as Flash probably won’t make it there any time soon:

no-flash-iphone