Vimeo is to video as Flickr is to photography.

With the advent of HD video becoming accessible, and especially since new DSLRs are starting to include video functionality, it’s only a matter of time until we start seeing an onslaught of professional grade home brewed videos. Oh, Wait… it’s already happened! New videographers are cranking out quality videos and short films faster than you can say social networking. And Vimeo is bubbling up to the top as the number one leader in video publishing and sharing.

Sharing artwork online is all about the community, being able to explore others’ work, and making it all easy. Vimeo hits the mark on all of these must-haves, but naturally there are competitors. Some of the competitors are better in certain areas, like ad sharing and integration for doing nerdy stuff.

In my opinion the leaders of the video sharing platform pack boil down to the following:

Vimeo – Makes it a cinch to upload, share your video (or album of videos) and set privacy controls. The community on Vimeo is active, and it’s easy to spend many happy half hours strolling through group galleries, or “Channels” as they call them.

Viddler – Nerd’s choice. Makes it super duper easy to customize your video player, choose how you want to deliver the video (Apple iTunes, etc.) and they even have an API (application programming interface). Also has a “Partner” program if you want to try and monetize with ads on your video.

Revver – An online video media network that shares ad revenues with you. They pair an advertisement with the video you upload, place it as a pre-roll ad bumper in your video, then share the revenue if anyone clicks on the ad. Kind of cool, but your video gets polluted with advertising, and you can’t control where it pops up (as part of their extended network).

Brightcove – Corporate choice. This video platform is robust, scalable, and enterprise class. Not really suited to the weekend enthusiast crowd. But if you need to publish professional videos and need high availability and quality, check ‘em out!

Yahoo! Video – Probably better than YouTube, but not as famous. That’s kind of how it goes for much of what Yahoo! does – probably better, but not as popular.