> 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.
How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business after this?
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."
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. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off?
If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days.
(edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)
Why is Vimeo using an unsustainable business model here anyway? Oh, right. They wanted growth. This is in the same vein of the bait-and-switch that Blockbuster Video did in the early 1990s. Grow unsustainably and hope you can snuff out your competition before you run out of funding.
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.
I'm confident customers' reactions would be very different had Vimeo told them "hey, you're actually costing us money, please upgrade to this plan that'll cost you about 30% more." In fact, Vimeo could have done that at 2x, 3x, 4x... But nope, let's pretend they're paying customers and reveal we've actually been subsidizing the service the whole time, but we need 17.5x the money now. And the customer is the arrogant one?
Now do you understand why people are mad?
The price isn't relevant. Giving someone less than a week to completely uproot themselves is extortion, plain and simple. It may even be illegal--I smell a class-action incoming.
My guess is that most people will cough up for a month or two and then leave. I know that I would definitely migrate off of a company which extorted me once.
However, that is equivalent to a quick infusion of a couple years of cash to Vimeo for quite a few of these customers. A quick pump of the numbers might get them a deal with somebody if this doesn't net them enough bad press.
Just a shakedown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.
It sounds almost like they've abandoned any attempt to find cost-savings through scale and they are heading towards being dependent on the services of an off-the-shelf developer-focussed competitor.
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.
Vimeo has transitioned through different strategic directions, and seems to have settled on B2B -- if this doesnt work for a platform user, move platform.
Had they given them a 30 day heads up, I can't see much room for criticism.
If this is their goal, They are doing the equivalent of walking into a big business meeting drunk, and then throwing up on some executive.
Centralized : Youtube, Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
Billing based on views instead of bandwidth
Dead simple and completely on point. You come, you click play and you watch. Done.
Whether this is worth $3500 a year vs a self-hosted solution is an open question, but their UI/UX is very much fine.
It doesn’t matter how good the product is, the space is just not profitable.
This is because Vimeo's embed offers:
1) No recommendations at the end
2) Customisable player controls
3) Control over where it can be embedded, etc
4) No ads
The downside is that they don't have much transparency over TOS / content policy removals. We had a random violation in one instance where the uploader recorded a screencast of something. Our best guess is that the system flagged it because the screens showed a UI with a user's profile and some dummy information which was likely understood to be real private information.
It's one thing when a free service does this, but a paid provider?!?
Interestingly, some schools block cloudflare stream though. Not sure if it's a common occurrence.
> 3) Control over where it can be embedded, etc
Is it still working now as most browsers are no longer sending referral domain on iframe requests?
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.
I know that Youtube is a ticking time bomb for those not monetizing the videos to Google liking. Enough horror stories from HN and friends.
So I would love to find an alternative but each time I investigate alternatives such as Vimeo I go back to Youtube.
Of course, I could self host, but dealing with various transcoding issues is not the best use of my time.
If you don't want to deal with storage, Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month and the Bandwidth Alliance will reduce/eliminate the egress costs.
If you want to just "upload files" you're going to be encoding a dozen different versions and bundling them as HLS/MPEG-DASH to not have a shitty client experience. You're going to need a fair amount of storage and a big pipe to handle multiple simultaneous streams. Also caching is a Hard Problem since not every version of a piece of content has equal levels of viewership at any given time.
YouTube and Vimeo (and the rest) handle all the storage, bandwidth, and transcoding. It's not something that you're going to do well without a lot of domain knowledge first. The market is littered with the corpses of companies that underestimated the difficulty and expense of streaming video over the web. It's certainly not so difficult as to be impossible, it's just non-trivially difficult and potentially expensive.
- creators expect no fees or a low fee and no ads - viewers now expect 1080p or even 4k option, and 60 frames/s.
Thanks h265, but even with the best compression out there the math doesn't add up to make a profit.
Perhaps that comes down to the fact feeding data is more expensive, even as a business and at scale, than to pull data as an individual with a home broadband. Unless you are Google, aws, or cloudflare and have leverage over other networks providers.
Decentralized solutions is our last hope. I say hope because it still isn't quite working performance-wise for the use case of streaming.
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
I’ve always seen them as more a backend provider for paywalled video content, makes sense they’d lean into that audience
I think Vimeo is doing some creative accounting to come up with the 1% number. It's probably 1% of all users on the site even if the vast majority of users have < 5 views.
For those of you that have done this, what would/does hosting and serving large videos cost you a month and how are you doing it?
I still have to implement a few tricks to go over 2 GB per file and add support for streaming. But I'm getting there.
We embed a Vimeo player but after this announcement we can switch out providers and still have the permalink. Invest on your own infrastructure as soon as you can.
https://media.handmade-seattle.com/roc-lang/ [1], https://media.handmade-seattle.com/metadesk/ [2], https://media.handmade-seattle.com/practical-data-oriented-d... [3]
1. roc-lang by Richard Feldman. A high level pure functional language with low level language performance in runtime and compile time. Looks like the holy grail, but it seems like it'll be a few years to see if it lives up to that.
2. github.com/dion-systems/metadesk . A DSL/meta-data format that is a superset of json for that is more readable and does not encode data structure like json.
3. Some good tips on designing your data structures for efficient memory usage. I won't call it "Data Oriented Design" based on the things in the talk. The sudden exponential jump in "good" code after years of plateau leave me disappointed overall. I don't see how the code can have an exponential jump in "better-ness" based on topics in the talk.
These ad-supported giants skew peoples idea of cost. They make it harder for others to compete - generating outrage when people compare the relative price to “free”.
5 GB limit for total storage.
500 MB upload limit per week.
I haven't used it for years, now I know I only use 2.3GB there. Safe from deletion I think.
Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 - March 2022 (223 comments)
117 videos * 150 average views * 90 average minutes / 1000 = $1,579/month for streaming (!)
(117 videos * 90 average minutes / 1000) * 5 = $50/month for storage
It sounds like these are long form videos, so I just put an average of 90 minutes each.
Still, video streaming seems very expensive.
Lets say these 90 minute videos were stored in multiple formats:
480p - 500MB 720p - 1.5GB 1080p - 3GB
S3 charges $0.023/GB for general storage.
117 videos * 5 gb * 0.023 = $13.455/month for storage
AWS charges $0.05/GB for outbound transfer. Lets say the streams are worst case, 1080p. That's 52.65TB in monthly transfer.
117 videos * 3 gb * 150 average views * 0.05 = $2,632.50/month for transfer (!)
So AWS is about 1/4th the cost for storage, but almost double for transfer. Suffice to say I'm not sure I understand the economics around video streaming.
I think their old plan was like $200 / year (I didn't use them personally since I didn't have a custom platform running) and it felt reasonably priced for that use case. When I eventually release my custom platform I was planning to use them and be happy about it. Thankfully I haven't gotten to the video playing component of the platform yet because I wouldn't want to use them under this new pricing strategy.
Wistia's pricing plans aren't much better (they are a competitor to Vimeo). It's $1,200 / year but also 25 cents per video on top of that. If you have a lot of small videos you get crushed. Suddenly 400x 5 minute videos means another $100 / month ($2,400 / year total). I don't understand why they would make their pricing model based on something that punishes folks who make smaller videos. Breaking up a single 50 minute video into 10x 5 minute videos shouldn't cost you 10x the price IMO.
It's unfortunate because it might take you years of producing videos before you even make a few hundred bucks a month, $150-300 a month on day 1 is a ton relative to that especially since that's only 1 component of your costs, then there's web hosting, payment provider transaction fees, refund fees, various taxes, etc.. Kind of makes it hard to get into a position to succeed unless you're able to invest many thousands of dollars up front.
Being able to provide that mich storage and video transcoding and traffic is not a cheap thing to do right.
Even yt reduces video resolution for less watched videos.
If 117 videos with about 800 views are 99th percentile of bandwidth usage among the customers I'd argue the company is dead. All the standard plans on their website are (according to the article) useless, since they get cancelled if you actually make use of the platform. Leaves the question which companies would rely on Vimeo for their videos. YouTube does it for free...
Their expectation of growth and success is well-understood by the Board of Directors and the Executive Team.
In less than a year, the IPO is complete and Elvis has left the building.
First, the rather clumsy manner in which this was handled - even if certain customers aren't profitable, asking 'em to suddenly pay 10x what they paid before is a recipe for bad press.
Second, if Vimeo is unwilling to exert the effort to handle niche customers, there are folks waiting in the wings like (https://instillvideo.com/) for health and fitness folks.
Third, long-term incentives suggest growing a customer base rather than short-term plays for larger clients.
Curious where these displaced customers land!
Now Vimeo is grown up I wonder if it’s time it decided what it’s going to be.
Compared to YouTube with a world of content at my fingertips, either from comments, or the endless recommendations surrounding the pages, Vimeo's insistence on the early Web 2.0 clean aesthetic kept it from ever becoming sticky.
I can see how early filmmakers gravitated towards Vimeo for that very reason, but then you're sort of left with just a hosting site for embeddable videos at the end of the day. Unfortunately, Vimeo as a brand never gets any mindshare and it fades into the background of the content hosted on it. That's fine and there's lots of space to explore on the tooling side for content producers, and actually, I see it as very similar to Stripe's business model.
HOWEVER, and something a bit more nuanced here, yes, Vimeo can provide all the tools a creator could possibly ever need, except, and a big one, discovery.
YouTube also supports non-searchable content, along with its discoverable content. So they can continue to dominate from mindshare alone.