Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ymcinema.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 317 posts

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

#51

Post by lelandfe »

bobitsaboy wrote: post #16
mjburgess wrote: post #6

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.

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

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

#52

Post by tootie »

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.

I don't think that's true. Vimeo is very competitive in the B2B space which is more lucrative per customer and has relatively simpler engineering challenges compared to scaling up to billions of views required for low-margin B2C.

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

#53

Post by lawl »

foepys wrote: post #27
tyingq wrote: 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…

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.

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.

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

#54

Post by detaro »

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

As I understand it, Patreon creators explicitly sign up to a paid Vimeo account and link that with their Patreon account, and then can upload to Vimeo through the Patreon posting UI. E.g. the post says they "tried to log into my Vimeo account".

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

#55

Post by tootie »

hammock wrote: post #31
tyingq wrote: 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…

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.

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.

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

#56

Post by candiddevmike »

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.

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.

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

#57

Post by NicoJuicy »

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #38

I have switched to Twitch and have been encouraging people to switch to Twitch. Twitch is a better platform in every aspect, not to mention boycotting spyware company like Google, which keeps users hostage for money.

You do know that Amazon acquired twitch, right?

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

#58

Post by sgc »

rdtwo wrote: post #26
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.

I think that’s the point. If you are running b2b services it’s a shakedown of small business clients

I think a lot of people here offer b2b services that are not shakedowns.

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

#59

Post by detaro »

candiddevmike wrote: post #56
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.

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.
Post reply on HN