Encode and publish your own HD video site on your own custom domain or embed individual videos using your choice of player stack. (We transcode, store, and stream H.264, Ogg, and WebM.)
It was a pitch, but it wasn't spam. He was just telling you that he had something similar to what you were looking for. People talk about their products here all the time. Heck, Patrick McKenzie's posts about his product are some of the most popular in HN history. Talking about startups is one of the stated purposes of Hacker News. Surely you've noticed this in all the time you've been a member.
Our site has HTML5 embeds (mp4), QR Codes for each video, and is free to use. Hit me up at info(at)moovatom.com if you want a beta account which lets you brand videos, get extensive reporting etc. Go here to try it free w/o needing to sign up:
Slightly off topic but I really hate how youtube tests stuff. I'm sure theres some rhyme or reason to it but from the end-user's perspective it just seems random. Example: I really like the "lower lights" feature on hulu which darkens the page background around the video. I remember for several months I would come across a button to do the same thing on youtube but it would only show up maybe 5% of the time. I can see no reason why that feature would be dependent on the video itself because it has to be just a simple CSS/JS trick.
It seems like it is about time Vimeo did this although right now there is no indication that they actually have. The RRW story doesn't link to anything that has the announcement from them and there is nothing on the Vimeo site about it either.
Why is it "about time"? You make it sound like Vimeo is years behind the pack, but in fact---if my understanding is correct---they are at the front, at least in regards to other big video hosting such as Youtube.
I agree they aren't that far behind but it is frustrating that they have taken a while to do it. The reason I say frustrating is because I use Google reader on an iPhone/iPad and if the feed includes a Youtube video it gets pulled in as html5. Youtube has had support for html5 video for a while now. Hopefully this change by Vimeo will be reflected in Google reader now as well.
I haven't used Google Reader on an iPad/iPhone but I think it's unlikely YouTube is using HTML5 there. Mobile Safari actually has a built in parser for YouTube embed code, so nearly any YT embed will work even thought it's clearly an <embed> tag right to a SWF. Normally Mobile Safari will completely ignore *.swf URLs.
So in some sense we're just now getting feature parity, in another we're ahead.
I believe that just says they are letting video and audio tags through. When those are in the feed the ipad can play the video inline in reader. A little testing seems to show that they are also letting their iframe embed through as well and when you use that you do get the html5 version of the player on the ipad and iphone. It looks like the Vimeo iframe embed isn't allowed to pass though but hopefully they will allow it. I put together a demo feed that shows the difference if anyone is interested:
http://serveany.s3.amazonaws.com/soclose.atom
Youtube has a custom player built into the iPhone/Pad - it's not standard HTML5 afaik, though they are experimenting with HTML5 embeds (see my comment above for link to the GOOG blog w/ deets).
Vimeo has always been one of my favourite video sites. If they would allow "gaming" videos I would use them for hosting too.