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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.”

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right? An existing customer? With no reasonable notice?

> You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?

Well, Cloudflare Stream is underlying tech, you would need to write some code on top of it anyway. 40% of premium does not sound like something unreasonable either.

I agree that treating existing customer like that is not a good thing. I just tried to understand whether that price is reasonable at all.

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

#182
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What'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 tag ... I don't think this was a good move by Vimeo, but maybe they're doing so bad (financially, as I think the…

The 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".

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

#183
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…

It’s not fair to compare premium cloud providers with dollar store providers like Hetzner. Especially if you’re going to ignore the cost of paying someone to set up and maintain that infrastructure, which is easily more than $3500/yr.

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

#184
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive," In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos, but still arrogantly believes she is entitled to infinite bandwidth for free because "that's what YouTube does."

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account…

>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated

Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.

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

#185
post #134
post #29

This 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…

> "I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive," In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos, but still arrogantly believes she is entitled to infinite bandwidth for free because "that's what YouTube does."

Seems you are the one who doesn't have any idea about how much "bandwidth" really costs, which is $0. When peering happens, do you think they put quota on how much bandwidth you can send through? No, you have a throughput limit but then after that its unmetered. No way Vimeo is paying per TB served if they hope to one day make profits (unless they already do so).

You can easily setup your own personal video hosting site serving TB of traffic per month (over a 1gbps port) for less than $100/month, as long as you stay away from anything "cloud" that is just trying to extract as much money from you as possible. I'm surprised that you somehow think someone else is less experienced than yourself when you don't know even know these basic facts on how the internet is priced.

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

#186
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…

You can't compare Hetzner boxes with CDNs. Imagine someone trying to stream a 4K video from your Hetzner box in Finland to Australia. Not the same as directly from local CDN node

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

#188
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account…

>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.

Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID.

That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy.

Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course.

I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago...

Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...

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

#189
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single provider deciding to charge you 16% of your revenue is kind of unusual.

Apple’s App Store charges much more than that for a service that includes only very basic hosting of an application package.

> includes only very basic hosting of an application package

Only basic hosting if you ignore all of the other services. You might consider the App Store's revenue share high but don't pretend the App Store is just a dumb file host.

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

#190
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive," In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos, but still arrogantly believes she is entitled to infinite bandwidth for free because "that's what YouTube does."

Curious; I’m pretty tech savvy, how much video could I self host (or in the cloud) for $200/yr?

see:

1. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us

2. https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpos...

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