If it works, it works.

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.

Yep that's pretty blatant.

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.

That's a fair argument - we built the player to match a popular style that our customers were requesting.

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.

I don't see the problem with copying this kind of thing - it's better for users if the flash experience is consistent, and how can you possibly improve on the Vimeo player? Is it better if they make a worse one for the sake of being different?