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

ymcinema.com

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

#71
post #30

FYI Update from Vimeo CEO posted Friday https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi... (disclaimer I am a Vimeo employee)

I 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.

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

#77
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#78
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less "because we can't be bothered" and more "because we don't want to compete with YouTube"

"Can't afford to compete" would also be accurate.

I 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).

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

#79
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.”

[deleted]

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

#80
This 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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

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