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Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
- kfarr 5y agoFYI Update from Vimeo CEO posted Friday https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwidth/ https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi... (disclaimer I am a Vimeo employee)
- Aeolun 5y agoAm I the only one that thinks 2TB is pretty low for a plan that costs $75/month?
- detaro 5y agoBandwidth pricing is always a difficult topic. E.g. one comparison: 2 TB traffic out of AWS CloudFront is $85-120/month (first TB free, per TB cost as listed for the second TB, depending on region), and that's traffic only, no storage, processing, ... Of course AWS traffic is not exactly cheap, but Vimeo is an all-in-one service handling more than just traffic.
- candiddevmike 5y agoThere are plenty of cloud providers without insane bandwidth fees, or Vimeo could host their services on premise. Netflix doesn't stream content from AWS, Vimeo needs a more cost effective architecture.
- detaro 5y agoI didn't claim Vimeo uses AWS.
- candiddevmike 5y agoI was just pointing to an example of not streaming from the cloud. Vimeo uses a combination of GCP and Fastly I believe https://cloud.google.com/customers/vimeo https://cloud.google.com/customers/vimeo
- smileybarry 5y agoBut that's CloudFront, one of the most expensive CDNs out there. (And that's before considering customers like Vimeo can get special rates, even 50% off is common) Another example on the opposite end is a host like Hetzner, where you get 20TB of traffic at 10Gb/s uplink for any cloud VM at $5+/month (or any root server at $40+/month). Comparably, AWS EC2 is $0.17/GB IIRC. On another note -- it looks like Vimeo are using Akamai.
- detaro 5y agoCloudfront is an example for "premium B2B service", which apparently Vimeo wants to be too. So they clearly have cheaper underlying prices, and then have costs for non-bandwidth and and want to make money on top. Same way that AWS is not for everybody that means that clearly Vimeo is not for everybody who is not willing to pay premium, but for the market, it's not totally out of order.
- moralestapia 5y agoWhat's the point of "premium" if you only want bits delivered at an acceptable rate? Bunny CDN would give you 2TB for about 20 bucks/month. I know you'd then have to use your own website/player but that's not really a big deal, most people that use Vimeo have a website anyway, it's not that hard to code an <embed> tag ... I don't think this was a good move by Vimeo, but maybe they're doing so bad (financially, as I think their product is great) that they don't really have a choice.
- omnimus 5y agoThe problem with comparing themselves with cloudflare/bunnycdn is that Vimeo is making big chunk of their money on "pro" creators who pay 20 bucks for what would be 0,5 usd costs those CDNs have. They have few videos with few streams - but Vimeo is their portfolio. They are limited by monthly upload sizes but thats all. I really think this shift is not smart one for them. Because these creators will move especially once they realize they would pay 3usd on cloudflare. And cloudflare/bunny smartly include pretty similar upload area and even videoplayers/iframes so there is not much difference to vimeo for these "creative pros".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 5y agoIt is low for just bandwidth, but I imagine the assumption is that it also represents the relative scale/cost for transcoding, storage, etc, as well. It still isn't cheap compared to diy, but that's what you're paying for, I guess.
- Aeolun 5y agoI was trying to say the amount of bandwidth does not correctly relate to the other components. Someone uploading things at that plan will very quickly hit 2TB in bandwidth. The plan itself may still be reasonable.
- Pooge 5y agoDo you think this will lead to the downfall of Vimeo? How are you and your colleagues interpreting this move?
- brycelarkin 5y agoI don’t believe her when she says this is because of bandwidth. Given Vimeo’s scale, they must have insanely low data out fees. The only way I can see what she’s saying being true is if there’s gross incompetence at the company and their cloud architecture is highly inefficient.
- andry1987 5y agoFastoCloud can provide video hosting on your servers. it will cost 25$ per month From your side need to have server near with your auditory.
- deadalus 5y agoVimeo Alternatives : Centralized : Youtube, Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
- beebeepka 5y agometacafe? the true indie tube
- vishnumohandas 5y agoCloudflare Stream[1] might be good fit for some use cases. [1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
- nathanyz 5y agoThrowing in us as well, Swarmify Billing based on views instead of bandwidth
- cronix 5y agoHow much of the video has to be watched to be considered "a view?"
- nathanyz 5y agoViews with us are more comparable to page views than a video play. So definitely higher than actual plays. We give such a generous amount that this is only more expensive than other providers in a limited set of use cases. This Vimeo policy change has been really good for business since we can also automatically convert all existing Vimeo embed over to us.
- hnbad 5y agoThese really feel more like YouTube alternatives. Are there any alternatives to Vimeo as a B2B service (e.g. hosting unlisted videos embedded behind paywalls)?
- KerrAvon 5y agoAs a consumer of Vimeo content from musicians and comedians, I can translate this to English: “We have given up trying to produce a competitive consumer solution because we can’t be bothered to hire a UX designer or do any basic consumer-level testing of our product at all. Fuck if we know how to make things work. But business don’t care.”
- lelandfe 5y agoI think it's less "because we can't be bothered" and more "because we don't want to compete with YouTube"
- darknavi 5y ago"Can't afford to compete" would also be accurate.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI wonder whether YouTube actually makes money yet or even if it does, would if it were standalone (as they can benefit from Google scale and Google infrastructure).
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoEarly on yes, but today YT is at least a $100b company by itself.
- MattGaiser 5y agoDoesn’t mean it makes money.
- TheRealNGenius 5y agodoesn't matter
- 5y ago
- corobo 5y ago2TB feels like a really low 99th percentile for a video site. Is Vimeo really that small? I’ve always seen them as more a backend provider for paywalled video content, makes sense they’d lean into that audience
- nacs 5y agoIt's not much at all in the days of 1080p @ 60fps and 4k videos. I think Vimeo is doing some creative accounting to come up with the 1% number. It's probably 1% of all users on the site even if the vast majority of users have < 5 views.
- mjburgess 5y agoAm I the only one thinking, "fair enough" ? Vimeo has transitioned through different strategic directions, and seems to have settled on B2B -- if this doesnt work for a platform user, move platform.
- bobitsaboy 5y agoGiving the creators a week or less notice and demanding such a sharp increase in fees is nothing less than a shakedown. Had they given them a 30 day heads up, I can't see much room for criticism.
- rdtwo 5y agoI think that’s the point. If you are running b2b services it’s a shakedown of small business clients
- sgc 5y agoI think a lot of people here offer b2b services that are not shakedowns.
- rdtwo 5y agoYou misunderstood. The small b2b are the ones getting shook down. Small b2b content providers are getting hit with huge cost so they can buy time to migrate off
- sgc 5y agoIf you meant that Vimeo is shaking down small business clients, that might be true. But the way you phrased things it sounded like you were saying small business services in general are a shakedown, and Vimeo was just another example of this.
- lelandfe 5y agoThe scenario with Channel 5 was even more silly, since Vimeo was just a service that Patreon was using. This not only looked like a shakedown, it was from a hosting platform the group wasn't even directly using. https://www.patreon.com/posts/vimeo-is-holding-61514364 https://www.patreon.com/posts/vimeo-is-holding-61514364
- m3kw9 5y agoThey seem to host a lot of recorded webinars and courses that can be made behind paywalls or memberships
- rdtwo 5y agoI think it’s a shakedown of those users. They probably think they can get a big cash infusion while those people migrate out. If you had a business hosting training videos then 1 week isn’t enough time to migrate you might end up eating a month or 2 at extortion pricing
- cinntaile 5y agoThis doesn't sound like a good long term strategy, you're losing a lot of goodwill from your small paying customers and they'll jump ship when the opportunity arises.
- rdtwo 5y agoIt’s a good short term play. If you extract 3k instead of 70/month you basically get paid for 3 years in one month. Clients are lost but good will isn’t that valuable when you have given up on growing and moved to extraction
- yashap 5y ago> She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average. Her most viewed video has around 815 views. … Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users, the company said Well that’s telling. Sounds like a company that’s on the rocks trying to squeeze money out of a small number of users to survive.
- throwaway27727 5y agoApparently her videos are multiple-hour long. So, caveats applied.
- yakak 5y agoIt probably could be expressed in a more resource representative way, but being in their top 1% and therefore needing to negotiate a custom plan apparently only requires 2TB of monthly bandwidth.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- FrenchDevRemote 5y agoTo be fair more than 9 out of 10 of youtube users don't get +10K views too...
- ipaddr 5y ago100,000 views = will come out to 100 dollar payout on youtube.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoI have to give it to YouTube they are keeping tons of obscure videos alive. For years.
- tyingq 5y agoNot that it excuses what's happening, or that it really puts her in the "top 1 percent"...but despite the low views, she could still be using a lot of bandwidth. Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing. That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I can see why she might need a higher end plan with such long videos. $25/month may not be enough to cover the bandwidth. What's confusing, though, is that their pricing page shows the highest-tier plan as $75/month, which is $900/year and described as "Unlimited live streaming - 7TB total storage". There's also the next plan down, at $50/month ($600/year), described as "No weekly Limits - 5TB total storage". So I'm curious where the $3500/year is coming from.
- totetsu 5y agoNow I have fomo for all those cool indie films, dances, animations etc, that are going to be deleted before I ever see them.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoThis seems like a job for archive.org. But I don't think even they could deal with the scale of something like Vimeo with only a week's notice. Sad days.
- sltkr 5y agoAnyone can upload their content to Archive.org if they want to preserve it for posterity.
- aceazzameen 5y agoThis is my first thought also. I wish I had all my favorites bookmarked, so I could download them myself.
- judge2020 5y agoThis is a response to the Patreon story from last week[0]. The thing with Vimeo charging that much for videos is that it doesn’t look like they actually needed Vimeo. Ya, it’s nice to have rich analytics, but it sounded like they would have been just fine simply distributing the MP4 to subscribers via some file transfer service, eg. WeTransfer. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704
- ohgodplsno 5y agoNobody wants to download a 20GB 4K video when you could just watch it online and have a bookmark.
- bobitsaboy 5y agoAh, did not see this one, sorry!
- judge2020 5y agoThat one didn't have vimeo's response IIRC so this is still useful.
- ModernMech 5y agoIt's so funny how that discussion goes exactly the same as the discussion in this article. It's like, you could have predicted all of the comments here before they were even posted.
- dang 5y agoThat's true of surprisingly many follow-up threads—nearly all of them in fact. Most don't contain significant-enough new information to budge the gravity of the discussion.
- BbzzbB 5y agoUnlisted YouTube video or Patreon's native video sharing both sound more appealing than some direct download.
- sandbags 5y agoI find it ironic since they essentially booted me off their platform for creating some vaguely-commercial content (I was a paying customer at the time). Left a very sour taste in my mouth esp. since other people they seemed to ignore.
- agumonkey 5y agoWasn't the indie side their original spin ?
- dna_polymerase 5y agoSo according to the cited creators Patreon she is now using Patreon's homegrown video hosting. [0] If 117 videos with about 800 views are 99th percentile of bandwidth usage among the customers I'd argue the company is dead. All the standard plans on their website are (according to the article) useless, since they get cancelled if you actually make use of the platform. Leaves the question which companies would rely on Vimeo for their videos. YouTube does it for free... [0]: https://www.patreon.com/loish https://www.patreon.com/loish
- neilv 5y agoThis sounds like a potentially great business clarity move: > We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube” But this part -- bait&switch, with only one week to decide or move, (if that's accurate) -- is not what you want from your B2B solution provider: > “I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” [...] if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
- bobitsaboy 5y agoIt's not even a sensible or pro-rated increase. Just a shakedown.
- kingkawn 5y agoExcept the point seems to be getting her to leave, not giving her a thoughtful way to stay.
- notatoad 5y agocoupled with the "we are a B2B solution" statement, i think they're trying to shake down patreon, not the individual creators - it sounds like vimeo wants patreon to start sending them money.
- apotheon 5y agoThis also seems like a great way to get everyone to leave. If what I wanted was a B2B platform, I wouldn't choose one with a history of suddenly changing its policies and only giving one week to catch up. In fact, it's often much more difficult for a larger business to move that quickly than an independent user.
- bobitsaboy 5y agoBingo!
- 5y ago
- coward123 5y agoIn my work, I have to create and share a lot of videos, and Vimeo is superior to YouTube for my needs. Doesn't auto-play some unrelated content when they are done with my videos, I can easily make basic edits like a custom thumbnail or branding, and it doesn't cover it in their own branding like YouTube. Integrates better into my site as well. So yeah - Vimeo is better than YouTube for B2B needs.
- spacechild1 5y agoAnother key feature: I can replace the file and keep the URL!
- arkitaip 5y agoVimeo is dying. There is no way they can stay afloat abusing their tiny and shrinking user base with an increasingly exorbitant pricing.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIBM disagrees.
- arkitaip 5y ago"Nobody ever got fired for choosing Vimeo" isn't a thing.
- johndfsgdgdfg 5y agoI have switched to Twitch and have been encouraging people to switch to Twitch. Twitch is a better platform in every aspect, not to mention boycotting spyware company like Google, which keeps users hostage for money.
- fareesh 5y agoWe have used Vimeo for some corporate clients' customer facing websites. This is because Vimeo's embed offers: 1) No recommendations at the end 2) Customisable player controls 3) Control over where it can be embedded, etc 4) No ads The downside is that they don't have much transparency over TOS / content policy removals. We had a random violation in one instance where the uploader recorded a screencast of something. Our best guess is that the system flagged it because the screens showed a UI with a user's profile and some dummy information which was likely understood to be real private information.
- ryanSrich 5y agoWe've been using Wistia for 2 years for our business that serves Security Awareness Training content directly in Slack. It works perfectly fine. The pricing isn't that bad either. It seems like Vimeo is going after this type of market. Which is totally fine. I think the biggest issue with the current situation is just how little notice Vimeo gave the client in question. 90 days is a pretty standard price increase notice for B2B. They should have just done that.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoWait, so Vimeo removes videos of paying customers, and does not even tell you why/let you talk to a human about it to understand and appeal the decision? It's one thing when a free service does this, but a paid provider?!?
- neurostimulant 5y agoIf you just use vimeo for video embeds, you can upload the videos into cloudflare stream instead as it supports embedding. Interestingly, some schools block cloudflare stream though. Not sure if it's a common occurrence. > 3) Control over where it can be embedded, etc Is it still working now as most browsers are no longer sending referral domain on iframe requests?
- Joeboy 5y agoCan I just like, buy some file hosting, scp AV1 files to it and embed them on my blog, these days?
- giantrobot 5y agoYou can but you've created a shitty experience. With AV1 you've excluded at least half your potential viewers. Even for people with a browser with AV1 support your files likely have a higher bitrate than your viewers can stream in real-time. If you want to just "upload files" you're going to be encoding a dozen different versions and bundling them as HLS/MPEG-DASH to not have a shitty client experience. You're going to need a fair amount of storage and a big pipe to handle multiple simultaneous streams. Also caching is a Hard Problem since not every version of a piece of content has equal levels of viewership at any given time. YouTube and Vimeo (and the rest) handle all the storage, bandwidth, and transcoding. It's not something that you're going to do well without a lot of domain knowledge first. The market is littered with the corpses of companies that underestimated the difficulty and expense of streaming video over the web. It's certainly not so difficult as to be impossible, it's just non-trivially difficult and potentially expensive.
- hirako2000 5y agoThis. And it seems the cost of networking is on the rise. Not per kb of course, but relative to the media economy at play. I don't see how a small player can enter the market: - creators expect no fees or a low fee and no ads - viewers now expect 1080p or even 4k option, and 60 frames/s. Thanks h265, but even with the best compression out there the math doesn't add up to make a profit. Perhaps that comes down to the fact feeding data is more expensive, even as a business and at scale, than to pull data as an individual with a home broadband. Unless you are Google, aws, or cloudflare and have leverage over other networks providers. Decentralized solutions is our last hope. I say hope because it still isn't quite working performance-wise for the use case of streaming.
- johnohara 5y ago89.26% of its shares are now owned by 375+ institutional investors. Their expectation of growth and success is well-understood by the Board of Directors and the Executive Team. In less than a year, the IPO is complete and Elvis has left the building.
- Existenceblinks 5y agoSo I check the Basic plan right now, it's: 5 GB limit for total storage. 500 MB upload limit per week. --- I haven't used it for years, now I know I only use 2.3GB there. Safe from deletion I think.
- hirako2000 5y agoThe basic plan was always pretty limited. And you certainly aren't safe from deletion if you hit that top 1% percentile of bandwidth use. Keep your channels unpopular just in case.
- hitovst 5y agoConsidering the practices of Youtube, Vimeo, and the like, I don't understand why bittorrent feeds aren't used more often.
- egypturnash 5y agoCan you tap a link to a torrent and watch the video it contains on your phone? If the answer is “no” then I think this is the answer to your question.
- worldmerge 5y agoWith webtorrent JS, yes.
- lillecarl 5y agoBut it doesn't have the infrastructure to handle different resolution delivery based on connection speed and such, on good connections sure but on unreliable connections it's not the same story.
- egypturnash 5y agoalso: subtitles (human-applied and machine-generated), variable speed, arbitrary skipping around the timeline...
- hannasanarion 5y agoYeah, it's almost like people who make things for a living want to be paid for things they make or something. Don't they know that I deserve everything for free because I know how to apt-get transmission?
- 0898 5y agoI also use Vimeo as a B2B solution and the “indie YouTube” side really frustrates me. Every time I search my own videos to find something, Vimeo defaults to scouring all its public videos and throwing up all kinds of twee college projects and thumbnails with laurel wreaths from film festivals. Now Vimeo is grown up I wonder if it’s time it decided what it’s going to be.
- ximus 5y agoFeels like Vimeo missed an opportunity to be the home of creatives. They had the right brand perception for it, and were there early. A video producer friend persevered hard to continue using it from 2012 to 2019, but out of chronic frustration with its product design, sadly moved to youtube. I got the sense of a general stubborn "we know what's right for you, you don't" attitude in their product design. And it seemed to satisfy no significant public well. Great to see them be more clear, wish them the best.
- tinus_hn 5y agoSounds like they tried and found it wasn’t sustainable.
- omnimus 5y agoIt was surely sustainable their revenue is plus 200mil year and the product haven't changed much over the years. It's not growing enough for shareholders though. But sustainable is not the right word.
- dbbk 5y agoBut they’ve been losing money for the last 3 quarters. They’re not profitable right now.
- skizm 5y agoYouTube was losing over a billion dollars per year for a long time. It is going to be tough to take them head on as a direct competitor.
- sofixa 5y agoFor all we know, they still do. Alphabet don't publish YouTube specific expenses.
- fullmetalpower 5y agowelp! time to forget about Vimeo... forever that is...
- whiddershins 5y agoWhat is the YouTube alternative, then?
- Tretiotrr 5y agoYeah that's why people like to underestimate that paying for YouTube makes sense. Being able to provide that mich storage and video transcoding and traffic is not a cheap thing to do right. Even yt reduces video resolution for less watched videos.
- sprayk 5y agoThis has been happening for the better part of a decade already. Back around 2012, I had already stopped seeing Vimeo come across my browsing history completely, but I was reminded of it's existence at a film festival where I heard about and saw vimeo being used to screen most of the more independent films. When I asked some of the festival organizers about how movies were screened, they said there were two ways (again, back in 2012): Digital Cinema Package (DCP) for more mainstream films (a DRM-laden harddrive package that was carried around to the screening location in a locked, nondescript hardcase), and password-protected Vimeo. Since then, the only time I've interacted with Vimeo was to watch episodes of IKEA Heights[0], as at the time this was the only place where it was officially distributed (i.e. in original quality, rather than re-encoded and re-uploaded to youtube). Great, weird, short series if you are interested. The play between the drama/acting, and then being brought back to reality by being caught, is very fun. If I recall correctly, this was around when they removed recommendation type features from their site, which was the first sign that I saw, personally, that they were moving away from something consumer focused. The DCP system was intriguing to me. They made DCP sound like a pain in the ass, requiring expensive projection equipment and some kind of special internet connection (they weren't familiar with that part) to receive films not distributed physically or to receive updates to films. Later, I looked up DCP on Wikipedia[1] and found it enlightening. The thing that stood out to me was the use of asymmetric encryption to ensure a particular DCP distribution was only able to be played on a particular projector, thanks to a symmetric key for the film being encrypted with a projector's public key, and decrypted using the private key stored on some kind of FIPS compliant HSM. [0] https://vimeo.com/channels/ikeaheights https://vimeo.com/channels/ikeaheights [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package
- ModernMech 5y agoOh man, I love Randall Park. Thanks for this it's hilarious.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIs there an agreed upon way to self host videos for less? For those of you that have done this, what would/does hosting and serving large videos cost you a month and how are you doing it?
- hirako2000 5y agoCosts me zero, hopefully for a while. https://hirakosan.surge.sh/what-am-i-up-to https://hirakosan.surge.sh/what-am-i-up-to I still have to implement a few tricks to go over 2 GB per file and add support for streaming. But I'm getting there.
- chx 5y agoLook at transit prices https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-trends https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-... 1mbps a month is 320 gigabyte so 2TB is 6mbps which costs a whopping 3.6 USD in Hong Kong 1.2 USD elsewhere. Where I am wrong? If you don't want to deal with storage, Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month and the Bandwidth Alliance will reduce/eliminate the egress costs.
- kolanos 5y agoI was curious what this would cost with Cloudflare Video [0]. They charge $1 per 1,000 minutes streamed and $5 per 1,000 minutes stored. 117 videos * 150 average views * 90 average minutes / 1000 = $1,579/month for streaming (!) (117 videos * 90 average minutes / 1000) * 5 = $50/month for storage It sounds like these are long form videos, so I just put an average of 90 minutes each. Still, video streaming seems very expensive. Lets say these 90 minute videos were stored in multiple formats: 480p - 500MB 720p - 1.5GB 1080p - 3GB S3 charges $0.023/GB for general storage. 117 videos * 5 gb * 0.023 = $13.455/month for storage AWS charges $0.05/GB for outbound transfer. Lets say the streams are worst case, 1080p. That's 52.65TB in monthly transfer. 117 videos * 3 gb * 150 average views * 0.05 = $2,632.50/month for transfer (!) So AWS is about 1/4th the cost for storage, but almost double for transfer. Suffice to say I'm not sure I understand the economics around video streaming. [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
- pictur 5y agoa better alternative to vimeo is pretty easy to create. It's weird that they take themselves so seriously.
- hirako2000 5y agoPlease go ahead. A cousin comment says the economic is against you, and I heartedly agree with that.
- pictur 5y agomy comment has nothing to do with economy. vimeo hasn't been doing anything good for years to gather users. it's just weird that they describe themselves as a movie site just because someone is uploading their amateur movies.
- hirako2000 5y agook you meant about Vimeo being stale for many years, with that I fully agree. They could have easily become the indie creators platform, and the top end of that. I even think they could even have become by now a serious threat to YouTube because creators is what makes the platform in the longer term, mainstream audience follow the elite eventually.
- sireat 5y agoI have over 500 unlisted (meaning you need to have the link to watch it) tutorial videos (30-180mins each) on Youtube. They are used for various programming classes that I teach. Each gets 10-100 views depending on class size. I know that Youtube is a ticking time bomb for those not monetizing the videos to Google liking. Enough horror stories from HN and friends. So I would love to find an alternative but each time I investigate alternatives such as Vimeo I go back to Youtube. Of course, I could self host, but dealing with various transcoding issues is not the best use of my time.
- DenseComet 5y agoNo harm in staying with YouTube for now, as long as you have a local copy of all your videos.
- Ir0nMan 5y agoSelf hosting is a fairly straight forward option: A simple VPS (linode, digital ocean, etc) and upload your .mp4 videos. If your videos are in a weird format all it takes is a single pass through Handbrake to make them stream-able friendly. You will have native HTML5 playback in the browser and have full control of your files and links.
- nickjj 5y agoVimeo felt like a good solution for someone who might be selling video courses. This is a use case where you might have 400-500x 5-10 minute videos spread over a few courses that were streamed to folks who purchased one of your courses using Vimeo's embedded video player that's sitting in a custom site you've built. I think their old plan was like $200 / year (I didn't use them personally since I didn't have a custom platform running) and it felt reasonably priced for that use case. When I eventually release my custom platform I was planning to use them and be happy about it. Thankfully I haven't gotten to the video playing component of the platform yet because I wouldn't want to use them under this new pricing strategy. Wistia's pricing plans aren't much better (they are a competitor to Vimeo). It's $1,200 / year but also 25 cents per video on top of that. If you have a lot of small videos you get crushed. Suddenly 400x 5 minute videos means another $100 / month ($2,400 / year total). I don't understand why they would make their pricing model based on something that punishes folks who make smaller videos. Breaking up a single 50 minute video into 10x 5 minute videos shouldn't cost you 10x the price IMO. It's unfortunate because it might take you years of producing videos before you even make a few hundred bucks a month, $150-300 a month on day 1 is a ton relative to that especially since that's only 1 component of your costs, then there's web hosting, payment provider transaction fees, refund fees, various taxes, etc.. Kind of makes it hard to get into a position to succeed unless you're able to invest many thousands of dollars up front.
- StreamBright 5y agoI wonder why do I watch only indie content on Vimeo?
- mcintyre1994 5y agoSo basically they want Patreon to be their customer instead of the individual creators? Probably not actually Patreon any more since they’ve upset all their mutual customers, but that kind of deal I guess?
- jarjoura 5y agoJust a side rant, but Vimeo always had this perception (to me), that it was a Ruby of Rails clone of YouTube. It had that very clean minimalist pastely UI with very easy to understand player, but always felt static. Compared to YouTube with a world of content at my fingertips, either from comments, or the endless recommendations surrounding the pages, Vimeo's insistence on the early Web 2.0 clean aesthetic kept it from ever becoming sticky. I can see how early filmmakers gravitated towards Vimeo for that very reason, but then you're sort of left with just a hosting site for embeddable videos at the end of the day. Unfortunately, Vimeo as a brand never gets any mindshare and it fades into the background of the content hosted on it. That's fine and there's lots of space to explore on the tooling side for content producers, and actually, I see it as very similar to Stripe's business model. HOWEVER, and something a bit more nuanced here, yes, Vimeo can provide all the tools a creator could possibly ever need, except, and a big one, discovery. YouTube also supports non-searchable content, along with its discoverable content. So they can continue to dominate from mindshare alone.
- worldmerge 5y agoIs is possible to do password protected torrent streaming? Like uploading your videos as a torrent and having webtorrent stream them only if a password was given?
- remram 5y agoYou could (and should) encrypt.
- tssva 5y agoAccording to Wikipedia as of November 2020 Vimeo had over 200 million users. I imagine most of those users have never uploaded a video, have upload very few for a limited audience or haven't uploaded a video in quite a while. I believe I have a Vimeo account that I haven't thought about for years and might have uploaded a video to years ago upon first signing up. The fast majority of their users are likely using no bandwidth. According to the same Wikipedia article as of November 2020 they had 1.6 million paying customers. I would wager that their paying customers account for the majority of bandwidth usage. 1% of 200 million is 2 million which means it is likely almost the entirety of their paying customers and a good number of active uploading non-paying customers fall within the top 1% of bandwidth users.
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- radium3d 5y agoIs there a reason YouTube/Alphabet have not entered into the URL-Locked video embed business? Seems like a simple thing they could easily implement in a few weeks.
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- throwaway984393 5y ago#nerdoutrageporn
- dlsa 5y agoA clear pivot. Yet it will definitely anger plenty of people. Like... a lot of people. Still, I don't appreciate the apparently short notice they gave. That's a significant change in their terms I'd be wary of in future. Something happened and there was a knee-jerk reaction or decision made. Not sure if I read that right however.
- dang 5y agoRecent and related: Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 - March 2022 (223 comments)
- evancoop 5y agoThere are a few issues here. First, the rather clumsy manner in which this was handled - even if certain customers aren't profitable, asking 'em to suddenly pay 10x what they paid before is a recipe for bad press. Second, if Vimeo is unwilling to exert the effort to handle niche customers, there are folks waiting in the wings like (https://instillvideo.com/ https://instillvideo.com/) for health and fitness folks. Third, long-term incentives suggest growing a customer base rather than short-term plays for larger clients. Curious where these displaced customers land!
- abnercoimbre 5y agoI strongly recommend indie creators use a personal domain link for each video that they publish. For our indie conference -- Handmade Seattle [0] -- we own the link to someone's talk. We embed a Vimeo player but after this announcement we can switch out providers and still have the permalink. Invest on your own infrastructure as soon as you can. [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com https://media.handmade-seattle.com
- fuzzythinker 5y agoOff topic, but thank you for the link. There are some very good talks there. I'll give a brief summary of 3 I picked to watch. https://media.handmade-seattle.com/roc-lang/ https://media.handmade-seattle.com/roc-lang/ [1], https://media.handmade-seattle.com/metadesk/ https://media.handmade-seattle.com/metadesk/ [2], https://media.handmade-seattle.com/practical-data-oriented-design/ https://media.handmade-seattle.com/practical-data-oriented-d... [3] 1. roc-lang by Richard Feldman. A high level pure functional language with low level language performance in runtime and compile time. Looks like the holy grail, but it seems like it'll be a few years to see if it lives up to that. 2. github.com/dion-systems/metadesk . A DSL/meta-data format that is a superset of json for that is more readable and does not encode data structure like json. 3. Some good tips on designing your data structures for efficient memory usage. I won't call it "Data Oriented Design" based on the things in the talk. The sudden exponential jump in "good" code after years of plateau leave me disappointed overall. I don't see how the code can have an exponential jump in "better-ness" based on topics in the talk.
- PrivateButts 5y agoAt my job we used Vimeo's OTT solution and it's been a pretty bad experience. We were promised features that didn't exist, and working with them has been like pulling teeth.
- supermatt 5y ago2TB egress a month (the quotes figure to be in top 1%) on AWS is ~$200/m. For a full solution charging $300 a month doesn’t seem unreasonable. These ad-supported giants skew peoples idea of cost. They make it harder for others to compete - generating outrage when people compare the relative price to “free”.
- unmole 5y agoAWS prices egress bandwidth at a ridiculous premium. It shouldn't cost a large host anywhere near that.