Am 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.
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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.”
#22> 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 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.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#23As 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.”
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Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#24Now I have fomo for all those cool indie films, dances, animations etc, that are going to be deleted before I ever see them.
This 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.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#25This 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
Ah, did not see this one, sorry!
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#26Am 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.
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.
I think that’s the point. If you are running b2b services it’s a shakedown of small business clients
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#27> 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…
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.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#28> 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…
Please tell me how streaming a few hundred hours of video needs to cost 25 bucks? Even at top resolution.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#29This 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.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#30FYI Update from Vimeo CEO posted Friday https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi... (disclaimer I am a Vimeo employee)