Everybody likes beautiful things, beauty is truly appealing when it is simple and unadulterated. Online video is here to stay on the internet, but a lot of videos sites have truly terrible interfaces. It literally wants to make you not visit them again. After all a good interface may make the difference between whether you view that a video on that site only once, or create a user account.
I went browsing through my gigantic list of sites that show online videos and picked the Top 8 UI's based on the most important rule when doing any design work. K.I.S.S {Keep It Simple Stupid}. I also picked the Worst 8. {RSS readers please click through site if videos don't load}
Here are the Top 8 in alphabetical order -
Brightcove - A lot of options within the video interface makes it very versatile wherever it is embedded. Plus the quality and size of the video is pretty good.
Guba - The video is huge on the main site, the embed code has it at a different dimension though. Clean and crisp UI with email this, fullscreen and a preview button that shows you various parts of the video as snapshots for easy jumping.
Heavy - A nice interface allowing you to embed with a host of options including posting directly to major blog hosting platforms like wordpress and blogger. The player on the site has a scrollbar on the bottom showing you more videos.
Jumpcut - I like this interface because it's so Web 2.0 type. With the drop shadow and everything. Though the embed version doesn't show it.
Metacafe - One of the most popular video sites out there. The options provided to the user in a clean UI makes them one of the most shared video sites after YouTube and Revver.
MotionBox - Tagging specific parts of a video and jumping to view only a specific portion of a video are some of their defining features. Sadly though most of the videos on there are boring.
Revver - A simple interface, not much clutter makes their videos a joy to watch. No wonder people are paying their bills by monetizing their videos with revver.
Viddler - One of the most intuitive interfaces I've seen. Comments popping up as you view the video keep the interaction level high between registered users. It almost made me want to register and post a comment.
Now for the Worst 8 also in alphabetical order -
AapkaVideo - The video size is small, ugly icons on the main site and just generally an overall bad UI experience.
DailyComedy - I couldn't get their videos to embed, but if you want to watch one - watch this one.
FunnyorDie.com - I honestly can't see one reason why people find this site funny, that aside the interface looks like it was designed by Will Ferrell himself.
Google Video - Yep, the extremely large portion that the UI takes on the site also blows the video out of proportion and look even worse than it actually is. This reason makes me not even think about Google when it comes to online video. Now I know why they bought YouTube.
Kyte.tv - The UI itself is not that bad, what really spoils everything is that orange border. Virtually every video site strays away from borders around their content and with good thought - because it's distracting.
LuLu.tv - By far the worst of the bunch.
Vidiac.com - Another video site that just looks it was put together as soon as possible next to 300X250 Google Adsense block.
YourDailyMedia - Windows media player?
That rounds it up.
Now, for the granddaddy of them all. YouTube has been progressing for quite some time with it's UI. It was quite horrid in the beginning but people still used them because, hey they were YouTube.
Anyway, the UI is as simple as it gets and they keep making it better. Though it's not the best.
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I like the functionality of vidler but nothing beats YouTube or Google Video, they are just extremely simple and extremely clean.
Nice list. I was blown away that YouTube was on the “worst” list. I guess I’ve just taken it for granted all these days just because as you said… they’re YouTube. I visited a couple of the top sites above and I can really see a difference in the UI experience. Thanks!
Actually before I mentioned YouTube I wrote “That rounds it up”.
YouTube isn’t on any list. As basically they were the first of their kind I left them out of both.
You shamed us into hiring a graphic designer. Look at it now:
http://www.lulu.tv
I’m hoping we moved up at least a notch to “not quite the worst of the bunch”.
–jeremy
with kyte, what orange border are you talking about?