--Vimeo also Launches "Watch Later" and "Universal Player"
OTT specialist, Roku, and IAC-owned video-sharing company, Vimeo, on Tuesday announced the launch of a Vimeo channel on the Roku platform. Roku is Vimeo's first partner in the home entertainment space, the companies said.
According to the companies, the channel, which Roku users can find in the Roku Channel Store, will feature the most popular videos on Vimeo--in "up-to-HD quality"--as selected by Vimeo staff. Roku customers who are also Vimeo users can link their account in order to watch their own videos, as well as those in their personalized inbox, the companies say. Vimeo's Roku channel also incorporates a new feature, called "Watch Later," which Vimeo has just launched across its entire service and which it bills as providing an easy way to queue up a playlist for later viewing (note: the Watch Later feature consists of a button that appears by default next to every Vimeo video: when Vimeo users click on the button, the video is sent to a personal album; the company says that it will shortly add the Watch Later button to its mobile service). "Vimeo is synonymous with the best that independent video creators have to offer, and giving Roku customers access to this quality entertainment in high definition further enhances the overall Roku experience," Jim Funk, Roku's VP of business development, said in a prepared statement. "We think of our Roku customers as a community of like-minded video enthusiasts who are looking for great value and great entertainment. Vimeo will be a great addition for Roku customers."
According to Roku, Vimeo's new channel is the 50th public channel to launch on its platform: the company's other channel partners include Netflix, Amazon VOD, MLB.tv and the UFC.
In other Vimeo news: The company--which rolled out an HTML5 player in January--on Tuesday updated its embed code in order to support HTML5. It calls the new embed code the Universal Player: "The Universal Player is as easy to use as the old embed code, just a lot more compatible," Vimeo states on its blog. "Instead of being a direct link to a Flash player the new Universal Player can automatically detect what kind of device is viewing the video and choose the optimum player based on the device's capabilities. For example, it will serve mobile video to iPhones and Androids and HD to iPads and Desktops. On other mobile devices it can use the native player of the device or an optimized mobile Flash player with bigger controls. It also allows us to introduce new players as technology changes, potentially allowing us to do things like serve HTML5 to IE9 and WebM video to Firefox. The goal is to make the Vimeo player experience as seamless as possible. No matter what device or Web site Vimeo embed code appears on, your video will load, with the same level of privacy, customization and quality you've all come to expect." More information on the Vimeo Universal Player is available here.
