Last week, YouTube brought out a new flash video player. The player had thumbnails of related videos from YouTube content included directly into the embedded video as you moused over it. This provides access to other YouTube videos through any embedded video.

People who have seen what we do over at Vquence noticed the similarity in the user interfaces. They also assumed that therefore the functionality must be the same. However, quite the opposite is true.

YouTube is a video hosting site. People upload videos there to publish them and most probably to re-embed them into their own websites. When you use video hosting, you don’t want your video hosting provider to suddenly display other videos on top of the one you have embedded, since that changes the perception of the page that you have created around the video.

Indeed, YouTube had to take back the mouse-over functionality one day after they introduced it because their users gave them negative feedback.

In contrast, Vquence is a video aggregator. The Vquence video player is for “playlists” (rather: slicecasts or vquences) of videos collected from multiple hosting sites. So, when you embed the Vquence player, you expect display of and easy access to all the videos in the slicecast. It is a very different concept: the aim is not the embedding of a video, but rather the recommendation of multiple videos to your readers. Vquences enable you to share your bookmarked videos in a viewer-friendly fashion. It’s not about embedding videos in your page – it’s about providing hyperlinks to videos by using videos.