Youtube’s out – so who is the king of tubing?

In my opinion, Youtube is losing the tubing race. The quality of their videos have been dipping for a long time, waiting times have growing, and the availability of the site can sometimes be erratic. Well then, you ask, who has taken the crown that Youtube once so proudly had?

Let’s take into consideration three sites; all with various levels of popularity. First up, we have Stage6, which is an online video service owned by DivX – a set of codecs and formats well known for their high quality videos. Stage6 is not particularly popular, yet. It’s videos do range in quality (as I can tell from watching an episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and comparing it to The Girl Next Door, also available on Stage6), but they have a much higher quality capacity when compared to Youtube. It had decent quality when being viewed full-screen on my 12.1″ monitor. View with discretion; there might be a few inappropriate advertisements.

Stage6, however, seems to be an infant when compared to Veoh and Daily Motion. However, I choose not to use Daily Motion for a variety of reasons; it’s GUI seems as though it could be categorized as a sketchy site, and its selection of videos are not what I would consider to be fun to watch (this is purely subjective, however). It’s layout is a bit similar to Veoh, coincidentally.

Speaking of Veoh, this seems to be the most obvious successor to Youtube. In contrast to Youtube’s simple white, Veoh has more of a glossy and glassy black going for it – a nice, sophisticated look that caught my favour almost instantly. The selection of videos is great, and it has similar video quality to Daily Motion, which are both much more impressive than Youtube. Veoh also has a downloadable player – however, under recommendation from friends, I have decided against downloading it . Perhaps you can prove us wrong, and give me your experience with the Veoh Player.

Youtube is definitely not the only tube out there – and Veoh is an uprising star (alright, I’ll say the same for Daily Motion too). But only time will tell who really takes the cake. And by the way – I think it’s the DivX player on Stage6 that makes Vista Aero revert back to Vista Basic.