http://cl.ly/3J1x213B1z1K3t1M3T2Q
I know there's more going on behind the scenes with Vidyard, however I hate that the Vidyard player gets credit for being "beautifully done" when Vimeo's top notch designers did all the work.
Plus the look is not what they are selling, Vidyard's value is in their analytics and thats why they are topping the news pipeline and thats why I doubt they (or their customers) care about being so close to Vimeo.
But I do have to question what the article's author meant by 'beautiful'. Maybe that Vidyard's videos (and hence their player) supports way higher resolution than any of these other free sites. That makes sense to me, look at their sample video - its one of the best demo videos I've ever seen.
I could see them re-designing it soon to something that's more uniquely them. That solution was probably just a quick and dirty attempt.
We've also built 9 other player's from scratch. There's not much you can tweak and re-design - we've done our best to hit the product market fit for what our customers and their viewers want.