6 ms·

Not 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

by tyingq 5y ago

Not 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.

foepys 5y ago
With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.
  - foepys 5y ago
    Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people. It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans. Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
    - 999900000999 5y ago
      Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad. Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean. If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
  - hkt 5y ago
    I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..
- lawl 5y ago
  It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page. So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai. I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.
  - skuhn 5y ago
    At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred. Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
- scruple 5y ago
  I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
- manquer 5y ago
  Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous. A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for . For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.
ramraj07 5y ago
Please tell me how streaming a few hundred hours of video needs to cost 25 bucks? Even at top resolution.
- verelo 5y ago
  Cheaper to mail out dvds
  - bragr 5y ago
    Maybe to mail them but not to have them made.
    - crumpled 5y ago
      Depends on what you mean by "have them made" You can definitely do it yourself on-demand for less than a couple bucks. I think you could have a semi-pro looking package, and still do it yourself for less than $10
      - verelo 5y ago
        Maybe it’s a generational thing. I used to buy 50 packs for $25 AUD, the cases were the most expensive part…if you really needed them.
hammock 5y ago
They said it's a custom plan. And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.
- PlanckMeasure80 5y ago
  Vimeo does a rolling buffer. It’s annoying when you’re trying to download videos.
- tootie 5y ago
  But why would they invest time and energy fixing a flaw for a customer spending $200/yr? That pays for like 2 hours of a senior engineer. More expedient to ask them to pay more or leave.
  - menzoic 5y ago
    Because it will save them money on all videos that aren't fully watched. Great ROI
    - tootie 5y ago
      I think this announcement is firmly stating that they don't have the volume of small customers for that to be economical. YouTube can spend tens of millions a year shaving every last byte off their egress because they have such enormous volume that is pays off in aggregate. Vimeo can't do that so they don't try.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - krisoft 5y ago
    The problem is that the acount in question would be a “low” to “midling” usage account in youtube or twitch terms. The kind where your friends tell you “just keep at it and one day you might find success”. Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms. The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo. Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Just to compare to Cloudflare Stream which I consider a honest paid platform: Streaming is $1 per 1000 minutes delivered Storage is $5 per 1000 minutes store per month. 117 videos with 2 hours each and with 150 views each: 117 * 2 * 60 = 14040 minutes stored or $14/month for storage which is $168/year. 117 * 2 * 60 * 150 = 2106000 minutes delivered or $2106. So $3500/year does not seem outrageous.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Put another way - this comes out to $0.12 per view for a 2 hour video (assuming low views per video). Considering the cost of bandwidth, you can't get that much better.
  - NavinF 5y ago
    Meh, I could host it in my data center for under $100/mo. Transit is like $0.1/mbps/month.
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      Cloudflare (and, obviuosly, vimeo) allows for good scalability and provides plenty of services underneath. You would need to code a lot of stuff to provide scalability (like imagine that your video became virus and thousands of people want to watch it at the same time, that's hundreds of gigabits of traffic). You would need to recode it for different devices. You would need to recode it for different network speeds. You would need to make reliable backups to prevent data loss. Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot of money for sure.
      - NavinF 5y ago
        I’ve implemented literally all of those things besides >100gbps which is a totally different discussion. I also had the additional constraint of realtime GPU encoding and low latency live streaming. Without that, the 1 year project would have been a weekend project. And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve the problem that this thread is about.

by tyingq 5y ago

foepys 5y ago

With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.
- foepys 5y ago
  Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people. It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans. Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad. Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean. If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
- hkt 5y ago
  I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..
lawl 5y ago
It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page. So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai. I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.
- skuhn 5y ago
  At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred. Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
scruple 5y ago
I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
manquer 5y ago
Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous. A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for . For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.

ramraj07 5y ago

Please tell me how streaming a few hundred hours of video needs to cost 25 bucks? Even at top resolution.

verelo 5y ago
Cheaper to mail out dvds
- bragr 5y ago
  Maybe to mail them but not to have them made.
  - crumpled 5y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "have them made" You can definitely do it yourself on-demand for less than a couple bucks. I think you could have a semi-pro looking package, and still do it yourself for less than $10
    - verelo 5y ago
      Maybe it’s a generational thing. I used to buy 50 packs for $25 AUD, the cases were the most expensive part…if you really needed them.

hammock 5y ago

They said it's a custom plan. And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.

PlanckMeasure80 5y ago
Vimeo does a rolling buffer. It’s annoying when you’re trying to download videos.
tootie 5y ago
But why would they invest time and energy fixing a flaw for a customer spending $200/yr? That pays for like 2 hours of a senior engineer. More expedient to ask them to pay more or leave.
- menzoic 5y ago
  Because it will save them money on all videos that aren't fully watched. Great ROI
  - tootie 5y ago
    I think this announcement is firmly stating that they don't have the volume of small customers for that to be economical. YouTube can spend tens of millions a year shaving every last byte off their egress because they have such enormous volume that is pays off in aggregate. Vimeo can't do that so they don't try.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- krisoft 5y ago
  The problem is that the acount in question would be a “low” to “midling” usage account in youtube or twitch terms. The kind where your friends tell you “just keep at it and one day you might find success”. Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms. The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo. Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.

vbezhenar 5y ago

Just to compare to Cloudflare Stream which I consider a honest paid platform: Streaming is $1 per 1000 minutes delivered Storage is $5 per 1000 minutes store per month. 117 videos with 2 hours each and with 150 views each: 117 * 2 * 60 = 14040 minutes stored or $14/month for storage which is $168/year. 117 * 2 * 60 * 150 = 2106000 minutes delivered or $2106. So $3500/year does not seem outrageous.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Put another way - this comes out to $0.12 per view for a 2 hour video (assuming low views per video). Considering the cost of bandwidth, you can't get that much better.
- NavinF 5y ago
  Meh, I could host it in my data center for under $100/mo. Transit is like $0.1/mbps/month.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Cloudflare (and, obviuosly, vimeo) allows for good scalability and provides plenty of services underneath. You would need to code a lot of stuff to provide scalability (like imagine that your video became virus and thousands of people want to watch it at the same time, that's hundreds of gigabits of traffic). You would need to recode it for different devices. You would need to recode it for different network speeds. You would need to make reliable backups to prevent data loss. Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot of money for sure.
    - NavinF 5y ago
      I’ve implemented literally all of those things besides >100gbps which is a totally different discussion. I also had the additional constraint of realtime GPU encoding and low latency live streaming. Without that, the 1 year project would have been a weekend project. And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve the problem that this thread is about.