Great news for people who keep up with their favorite shows via online video: Vimeo today released its Universal Player that allows viewers to watch embedded videos on mobile devices.
It’s a move that, methinks, will help force content owners to start making their videos available to mobile consumers. Last week I opined the inability of mobile phones–even those with Android 2.2 and its Flash capabilities–to play videos on Hulu, due to copyright owners not wanting their material on the platform. But Vimeo has long been a great, er, alternative to official network video sites. (I waver on the term alternative since, rather, it’s one of the unofficial sites that got networks and production companies to realize they needed to put their materials online themselves.)
“With the latest generation of browsers and devices, we’ve had huge demand for an embeddable player that works with HTML5 and on devices like iPad and iPhone,” Andrew Pile, Vice President of Product and Development for Vimeo, said in a press release. “The new embeddable code is highly scalable and allows us to continue to add support as new browsers and devices are released, for example serving HTML5 to IE9 and our Flash mobile player to Android phones running Flash 10.1.”
This means forward-thinking marketers who create user-generated content, and post on Vimeo, are guaranteed to reach mobile consumers. And you know, so are promoters of big-name shows whose loyal viewers would be thrilled to watch their favorite programs on their phones.
