The age old (well recent age) dilemma of how to distribute HD.
Every method has pluses and minuses
Vimeo is a reasonable choice.
It can play 720p24, 25, 30
Encodes to H.264 at about 1500kbps or so.
Make sure you see "HD is on" on the right of the video.
Click the full screen button. The 4 point thing on the right of the player bar.
When it goes full screen look on the right and turn HD scaling OFF. That'll display it in actual 720p otherwise it may get scaled to your monitor size (too big in some cases).
I have a computer graphics card with 2 DVI outputs. I connect the 2nd output to my 46" HDTV with a DVI to HDMI cable. I drag my browser over to it and then play the Vimeo video.
Advantage is sending the link to your friends. Disadvantage they have to watch on their computer monitor unless they know how to send it to an HDTV.
In Vimeo you can also allow the viewer to download the original file you uploaded, which is pre their compression. Users can view this file on their desktop. For example, I upload 720p30 at 5000kbps in H.264 .mov. Viewer can download, open in Quicktime, send to HDTV as above.
BTW it's also possible to do this with YouTube which also plays 720p but doesn't allow download.
ExposureRoom is another good distribution point. It can be used similarly to Vimeo.
