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Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

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Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#61

Post by cortesoft »

KerrAvon wrote: post #3

As 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.”

I think it is more “it is impossible to build a business around free streaming that can compete with YouTube”

It doesn’t matter how good the product is, the space is just not profitable.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#62

Post by foepys »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #49
foepys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.

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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#63

Post by smileybarry »

detaro wrote: post #42
Aeolun wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that thinks 2TB is pretty low for a plan that costs $75/month?

Bandwidth 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.

But 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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#64

Post by vbezhenar »

tyingq wrote: post #22
yashap wrote: post #8

> 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.

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/ 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 c…

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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#66

Post by 0898 »

I 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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#67

Post by detaro »

smileybarry wrote: post #63
detaro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandwidth 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.

But 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 us…

Cloudfront 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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#68

Post by candiddevmike »

detaro wrote: post #59
candiddevmike wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There 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.

I didn't claim Vimeo uses AWS.

I 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

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#69

Post by ximus »

Feels 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.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#70

Post by bobitsaboy »

lelandfe wrote: post #51
bobitsaboy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving 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.

The 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

Interesting. There's one Patreon I subscribe to that used Vimeo. I didn't realize it was what Patreon apparently exclusively used? This sounds like a BIG problem for Patreon, then.

This may be a much bigger issue than I thought...

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