We took a closer look at the service's features when the company launched in August. While the desktop client has evolved since then, the basic features remain the same.

In our tests, the service worked just as advertised and the image quality of the 1080p streams was very high. It takes a decent broadband connection to work well, however - the HD video streams take up about 3Mbps. Dyyno supports up to 30 frames per second and encodes its videos in H.264. The company does not automatically scale the video streams down for users with slower connections, though for on-demand video, content owners can choose different bitrates for their videos.

Running Dyyno's desktop client is very easy. After installing the application, you just have to drag the Dyyno logo from the client to any window on your computer and it will automatically start to stream this video on your personal Dyyno page. In addition to live streaming, users can also create a "WebTV" channels that plays videos at a set time.

Requires a Plugin

The fact that it takes a browser plugin to run the service could be a roadblock for some potential users, however. On the other hand, no other service that we are aware of offers free 1080p live streaming.

Pricing

As Dyyno's platform is based on a P2P architecture, it only makes sense for the company to offer the live streams for free. After all, the more users watch the stream, the easier it will be for Dyyno to deliver the video. The company does charge users who want to store more than 1GB of video for on-demand streaming on Dyyno's servers $10 per month. Dyyno does not charge for bandwidth. The P2P architecture doesn't lend itself for on-demand streaming, so Dyyno chose to charge for this aspect of its service.

The company also offers business channels for $100 month, which include a total of 10 video channels and up to 100GB of storage. The company's high-end account, the Dyyno Broadcast station, costs $1,000 per month, and allows users to store an archive of up to 1,000GB of video and broadcast more than 100 concurrent video streams. Both the business and the broadcast accounts are stripped of all Dyyno's branding. Dyyno plans to offer an ad revenue share model to companies that subscribe to these higher-end accounts and who want to make use of Dyyno's on-demand streaming solutions.

YouTube is no different. Today, they announced the latest enhancement to the YouTube platform - a widescreen video format across the site - which they hope will provide users with "a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience."

And while the widescreen feature - although a dramatic change to the YouTube player we're used to seeing - doesn't really give rise to speculation, the combined series of recent upgrades to YouTube certainly do. First there was the high-definition video, then the live streaming, and now the widescreen. You have to wonder what Google has up their sleeve for this property. Or maybe you don't. Maybe it's obvious.

Clearly, Google can't be putting all of this effort into YouTube simply for bringing MGM movies to the Web. Can it? Isn't there likely something more happening? I would think so. But what does YouTube have in store? More movies? Television? Live sports? Hard to say. But it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to conjure up images of another room in which YouTube's widescreen HD content could be living. Keyword there being "living."

If a loyal user base - and USA Today - are to be believed, few user-generated video sites compare with Vimeo, a small but well-loved online video site with some of the best HD capabilities around. And after today, Vimeo is highly likely to be serving up more of that HD content, thanks to the release of Vimeo Plus.

But one feature stands out for anyone who has ever sat drumming his or her fingers while waiting for a video service to finish the encoding process: Buying Vimeo Plus entitles users to priority uploading. That alone may be worth $5 a month.

For all the new found freedom a paying user gets, the service still has some limits. NewTeeVee highlights some of the intricacies of the small print for Vimeo Plus, including the fact that - even with a Plus account - "HD embeds are limited to 1,000 plays." Going over that limit results in a reduction in definition until the user purchases more HD plays.

It's not just the paying customers that have limits. The free users have had some new limits added as well. Vimeo point out that "you'll only be able to upload one HD video per week. You will also be limited to creating 1 Group, 1 Channel and 3 Albums."

All in all, the trade-offs seem fair and aren't like to adversely impact users' opinions of Vimeo in the long run.

The Real Question: Can Vimeo Convert Loyal Users into Paying Customers?

Vimeo's user base is active and loyal - but relatively small. In these uneasy times for the online ad world, Vimeo's decision to trade unpredictable ad revenue for subscription revenue is shrewd. Why? Aside from the likelihood of higher revenues, the subscription base will give Vimeo a better chance of predicting its cash flow month-to-month. The higher-ups - especially when they're higher-ups like Barry Diller - tend to appreciate that kind of predictability.

But for all the predictability, will anyone bite? It's not unheard of for a loyal user base on a free service to translate into paying customers for a fee service - especially if the cost is reasonable. Flickr Pro immediately jumps to mind. With the nominal cost of Vimeo Plus, Vimeo has the potential to see that kind of conversion, as well.

Will the latest features and benefits cause those loyal users to step up? We'll have to watch - in HD - and see.

It's official: Toshiba, the leading partner in the HD DVD camp, has waved the white flag. The next generation DVD format war is over. Blu-ray wins.

The move to stop production of HD DVD players and recorders was an "agonising decision", according to Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida, but one that the company had to take after "judging that there is no way of winning the competition."

What followed was to some extent inevitable. Blockbuster, Netflix and Wal-Mart all dropped support for HD DVD, and Best Buy also said it would favor Blu-ray. The old adage, "follow the money", which in this case means content, applies.

"It shows what a highly competitive market it is. When it comes to video, it is the person with the most content that wins," says Gartner analyst Paul O'Donovan (BBC News).

The technical and commercial superiority of each format - HD DVD and Blu-ray - is likely to be debated for years, as is whether the consumer drew the short straw in all of this. But the fact remains that Blu-ray will be the disc format of choice going forward. (I'm feeling a little smug at this point having recently bought a PlayStation 3 with its built-in Blu-ray drive - for once I backed a winner!).

However, a much longer battle lies ahead - HD downloads - leading some to argue that the next-gen DVD format war is irrelevant. In the future consumers won't buy physical media, they'll purchase and download it over the Internet.

True but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

High definition downloads from services such as iTunes, XBox Live and Vudu are in their infancy, and the competing standards of HD DVD and Blu-ray pale into insignificance compared with the many formats and DRM schemes that make up digital downloads. Moving to HD downloads also puts a greater strain on broadband speeds, bandwidth and storage. The latter isn't an issue for rentals but for those who like to own their movie collections, be prepared to bulk up on hard drive space.

Of course, the biggest lesson that the burgeoning HD download market can learn from Blu-ray's success, is also its biggest hurdle. Content wins. And this is where every HD download service currently falls short. Until the major studios treat HD downloads on par with physical media in terms of title availability and release windows, consumers will continue to vote with their wallets for DVDs and now Blu-ray.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

YouTube's Steve Chen told Liz Gannes and Om Malik in November that YouTube is not focused on enabling HD as much as they are on universal access. His statements were a bit unclear though. A substantial group of outspoken video producers seem determined to demand HD for their work, but Chen contends that short form online video isn't a suitable setting for HD.

Given the percentage of views on the site that come from professionally produced content like music videos, I can only imagine it's a matter of time until YouTube goes HD.

Vimeo isn't a competitor numbers wise around the world, but they do host some very high quality content. DailyMotion is a significant competitor for viewer numbers, outside the US at least. The company has raised more than $40 million in venture backing. Below is a sample of DailyMotion's HD content, already in a larger player than the embed code offers by default. Video consumption is a pliable thing, to some degree that's true even for the lowest common denominator of YouTube viewers. I think YouTube should offer HD.