One of the reasons I stopped using SmugMug was that all my videos were re-encoded/recompressed, and I could visibly see degradation. Is this still the case?
One of the great dilemmas with online video is the bitrate at which you compress. The more you compress, the better then deliverability (faster starts + fewer skips, stutters, pauses, etc). But, of course, you suffer quality loss. If you compress less, at a certain point, almost no one can view your videos because the bandwidth requirements are too high.
Every video service ends up deciding what's more important to them. To us, our decision point has been that we should deliver higher quality 1080p video than anywhere else on the Internet, and I believe we deliver that today. Our quality at that resolution exceeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. As a result, though, fewer people can stream it at 1080p. There are two parts to our bet: 1) Bandwidth continues to increase, so in the future more people will be able to view it at this quality, and 2) our brand promise is that your photos & videos look better here than anywhere else.
But we can't just leave it at that, because people do want to watch these videos. So what we do is compromise on the compression at lower resolutions so they stream quickly and with few errors. At 720p and lower, we're comparable to the other services in terms of quality, bitrate, and deliverability. In the end, it means we can deliver a very good experience to people with ample bandwidth, and a fairly good experience to people without.
If you have some examples, I'd be happy to take a look and make sure we're meeting our goals on both those fronts.
We've increased it a few times over the years, so I'd guess we'll increase it again in the future.
FYI, it isn't constrained technically or for business reasons, but instead is constrained for product reasons. We can see that longer videos simply don't get watched as often. And we rarely get pushback from our customers on the 20 minute limit, probably for this reason - they're making videos their friends, families & customers want to watch, which are less than 20 minutes.
But I'd love to know your use case and what you'd use longer video lengths for. Entirely possible we're off base here and aren't thinking of some great use cases.
I think it's safe to say we will support 4K sometime in the future, but that's pending customer demand, which we're just not seeing huge amounts of.