[HN Gopher] Vimeo: "We are a B2B solution, not the indie version...
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Vimeo: "We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube."
Author : bobitsaboy
Score : 273 points
Date : 2022-03-20 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ymcinema.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ymcinema.com)
| chx wrote:
| Look at transit prices
| https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-...
| 1mbps a month is 320 gigabyte so 2TB is 6mbps which costs a
| whopping 3.6 USD in Hong Kong 1.2 USD elsewhere. Where I am
| wrong?
|
| 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.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| How does it eliminate egress cost? It just makes bolting their
| different services together free, at some point you'll pay for
| egress eventually, even if just a little.
| chx wrote:
| Egress from B2 to Vimeo. So Vimeo doesn't have to pay more
| than $5/TB/Month for storage.
| kolanos wrote:
| I was curious what this would cost with Cloudflare Video [0].
| They charge $1 per 1,000 minutes streamed and $5 per 1,000
| minutes stored.
|
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| So basically they want Patreon to be their customer instead of
| the individual creators? Probably not actually Patreon any more
| since they've upset all their mutual customers, but that kind of
| deal I guess?
| neilv wrote:
| 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 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._
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| She makes around $25k a month from her videos, so paying $3.1k
| for hosting doesn't seem like an unusual cost. However, it's
| obvious that she derives no benefit from being able to control
| her own branding or whatever value-add that vimeo provides over
| youtube so putting it on an ad-supported platform like youtube
| probably just makes more sense for her.
| na85 wrote:
| Where did you find the $25k/mo figure? TFA says that her most
| popular video has less than a thousand views.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| From her patreon. She has 5600 patrons and her only
| subscription option is $5/mo.
|
| Her videos have only 4-digit views, but they are all
| multiple hours long Vimeo is asking for around $7/hour of
| video/year.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| "Less than 1000" is 3 digits rather than 4. What does the
| $7/hour mean? If it's $7/hour of viewing time, that is
| completely nuts. How many videos are there? If there is 1
| video/week at 2 hours each and 1000 views each (this
| sounds like an overestimate), that's ~ 100k viewing
| hours, or 3 cents per hour. That's closer to reasonable
| but it is a lower bound. At 1 mbit/second (this will vary
| but figure lots of mobile device clients) that's 45TB
| transferred or 7 cents per GB. Less crazy than AWS, but
| still pretty steep. Maybe this is an opportunity for
| someone. I'd like to know the actual numbers.
| namlem wrote:
| You actually can give lower amounts than the minimum on
| Patreon if you go into the setting iirc.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| $3500 for hosting on top of what they already paid for
| hosting for the current length of their plan, with 7 days
| notice to vacate otherwise. And then how much next week? The
| week after that?
|
| How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business
| after this?
| spicybright wrote:
| To add, this is why people serious about their business
| generally will enter into contracts with other businesses
| to ensure either side can't screw each other over. And it
| provides a clear transition plan if one party wants to
| leave.
| asdfaoeu wrote:
| For something thats $200/yr no one would be offering
| that.
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| No but you would expect price changes like this to be
| given advanced notice and implemented only after a
| current contract ends
| spicybright wrote:
| Then you'd pay more to use service that would if the
| corner stone of your business can crumble overnight.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| What? Of course they would. Send salespeople over to your
| office to negotiate terms, probably not. Standard
| contract with clear statement of fees, durations,
| renewals, etc? Pretty much any subscription service will
| have that. VPS on an annual plan, for example.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| That 3500 is for a whole year. The per month cost is $300.
| That's 1.5% of the income that she gets from the videos.
| gundmc wrote:
| Revenue, not income*
| [deleted]
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| The amount almost doesn't matter (it's definitely on the
| high side compared to alternatives). They can definitely
| afford it if they have a reasonable budget. However, how
| Vimeo has treated them as a paying customer is terrible.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| What alternatives have you looked at? It's fair priced
| imo.
| nacs wrote:
| Hvae you heard of Youtube?
|
| They'll even pay for the videos instead.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Youtube is ad-supported. You can't upload videos more
| than 15 minutes long without letting Youtube put preroll
| and mid-roll ads all over them, and the only access-
| control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody
| with the URL can see it.
|
| Creators don't want to force their paying Patreon
| supporters to watch ads for content that they paid for,
| and that can be leaked to the whole world if somebody
| merely ctrl-vs a bit of text.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| > the only access-control method it supports is
| "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.
|
| Google Workspace supports videos which are private to an
| organization, but it's annoying to use (you have to
| switch your active account to the Workspace one) and
| much, much more expensive than Vimeo's new pricing scheme
| if you used it just for private videos.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It's an ad supported video platform that will give data
| to google, advertise your competitors to your customers,
| distract your customers from your product by being an
| entertainment social network site, have relatively poor
| analytics, etc. It's a non-starter for many businesses.
|
| But of course not using it only makes sense if you can
| monetize your videos yourself by selling it or another
| product.
|
| When you upload on YT you are the product, YT sells you
| and your data and they profit. What vimeo is selling is
| hosting, saas, and bandwidth. They dont' profit at all
| except for what you pay them. vimeo comparatively to CDNs
| and SaaS hosting providers have a decent price. If you
| don't think so then hire someone to set up cloudflare
| stream and your own website.
| somebodythere wrote:
| A single provider deciding to charge you 16% of your revenue
| is kind of unusual.
| namlem wrote:
| More like 1.2% of her revenue.
| hackernewds wrote:
| It's $3500 per year so costs more like 16%/12.
| Intentionally deceptive and also a very reasonable cost
| slenk wrote:
| Not with a week to decide on such a massive hike
| pavlov wrote:
| Apple's App Store charges much more than that for a service
| that includes only very basic hosting of an application
| package.
| humanistbot wrote:
| That is also egregious, but Apple and Google are getting
| away with it because they have a duopoly over mobile
| phone app stores. Not so with video hosting.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Isn't it so though? What viable alternatives exist?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Definitely educate me, but: what is Vimeo doing for a B2B
| solution that Youtube can't provide? You can provide
| unlisted videos (and that is something a few pareon users
| have done).
|
| It's odd because Vimeo was most known to me for hosting
| art portfolios, so seeing it denounce it's "indie" status
| is bewildering. I assume the advantage comes from
| providing uncompressed videos with extremely high
| bitrate. Which is an admittedly extremely niche market.
| eigen wrote:
| an alternative is Amazon Video Direct where content
| providers receive 50% of net revenue. seems like a worse
| deal than Apple & Google.
|
| https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G2020374
| 10&...
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| What else do they do besides provide a payments gateway (
| that they force you to use)? As seen with Android, you
| don't need to use the official app store to use the
| official SDKs and platform APIs.
| shuckles wrote:
| Developing 3rd party frameworks is a meaningful expense.
| AOSP means Google made a business decision to incur that
| expense and sign away rights to it, but Apple hasn't.
| syshum wrote:
| I have never understood how pointing out another
| unethical policy justifies the first unethical policy
|
| It seems we as a society have lost the axiom of "2 wrongs
| do not make a right" as it is not just this area were I
| see people attempting to justify their wrongs based on
| the wrongs of others...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| And that is a bad thing.
| ericpauley wrote:
| 1%, the 3500 is yearly.
| com2kid wrote:
| Consumer electronics.
|
| Make a device for $5, it'll sell on store shelves for $30,
| you may get $3-$5 of that.
|
| Everyone is super spoiled by the finances behind digital
| distribution methods.
| matt-attack wrote:
| Try running an IHOP or the like. You'll be keeping a
| dollar or two on that $15 entree.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| Or a gas station.
|
| Their margins are outrageous but only if they can get you
| to come inside - they're only making a cent or two off
| each gallon of gas they sell.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Here in Europe, some brands (that I consistently stay
| away from) like BP have consistently higher prices than
| rest of the market. We talk about competition of Eni,
| Shell, Total, Agip etc. Not meaning no-name questionable
| shops.
|
| I don't think they are that ineffective in manufacturing,
| renting/buying land, building infrastructure or paying
| much more. Some locations ask for higher prices just
| because they don't have any competition in area.
|
| And yes they charge easily 3x for stuff they know you
| will buy like redbulls, chocolate and so on.
| golem14 wrote:
| And yet: there are gas stations hundred feet away from
| each other that have gas prices tens of cents apart.
| 8note wrote:
| Which makes sense. They've found the best locations to
| sell gas from, and also the best places to receive large
| gas shipments and store enough gas to sell safely
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| But that $14 went to 50 different suppliers. Your dairy
| supplier didn't suddenly decide they are worth $5 all by
| themselves.
| matt-attack wrote:
| Well that's a distinction without a difference to the
| IHOP owner.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Incorrect.
| abraae wrote:
| Tell that to Google ads.
| jahewson wrote:
| It's 1% of revenue. You mixed up monthly and annual.
| [deleted]
| bryans wrote:
| > "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."
| gundmc wrote:
| Not for free, for $200.
| Kina wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| technobabbler wrote:
| 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 and let
| people decide what to do if they get close to that limit.
|
| 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)
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
| technobabbler wrote:
| 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://lin
| ux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this
| felt unlimited. The competition was offering around
| 5-10MB.
| technobabbler wrote:
| Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply
| that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar
| situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users
| needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere
| near the limit).
| to11mtm wrote:
| Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon...
| MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to
| pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits.
|
| And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB.
| but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between
| VHS and DVD quality of a movie.
|
| Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my
| systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked
| great for a few years.
| coolso wrote:
| They also had a "gimmick" where you could literally watch
| your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or
| something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the
| bottom saying my free space available was "1.053746843GB"
| and it would be moving.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > But should it be her job as a content producer to
| understand Vimeo's costs and margins
|
| Not exactly. They should inform her of those through the
| price signals they send. Which appears to be exactly what
| she is complaining about.
| mikechalmers wrote:
| Why is it arrogant or entitlement when there are several
| services which allow video uploads for free, never mind
| $200/year? If you look at her play counts and read her
| position, I don't think there's indication of her expecting
| "infinite bandwidth".
| cruano wrote:
| Just because I gave you free candy doesn't mean you can go
| to the store and take it for free too
|
| And if you want the free candy, stay with the guy giving
| you free candy don't complain about the rest
| ozim wrote:
| There are several services which allow video uploads for
| "free" not really for free.
|
| People have to understand that those companies are burning
| VC money to bait and switch people.
|
| It is basically "dumping" and starving any competition
| until they find way to extract money from users ... or just
| sell BS to investors that they will get money from users.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Curious; I'm pretty tech savvy, how much video could I self
| host (or in the cloud) for $200/yr?
| gruez wrote:
| see:
|
| 1. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us
|
| 2. https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-
| purpos...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This depends on multiple factors. Entities like YouTube
| which use a lot of bandwidth own boxes in datacenters (well
| in Google's case, they own the datacenter as well). From
| there it depends on the DC. Most IP transit is charged
| based on the max of your egress or ingress costs. Some DCs
| offer you unmetered bandwidth but then charge you more than
| you would have paid for transit.
|
| The big cloud companies, like AWS, GCP, Linode, or Hetzner
| usually have these deals in place already and then charge
| you for egress to recoup/profit off their bandwidth costs.
| At $200 / yr, you're going to be playing big cloud egress
| costs as most IP transit is a lot more expensive.
| Cloudflare [1] has a series of posts about this though the
| costs are probably very out of date by now.
|
| [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-
| bandwidth-a...
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| 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.
| bryans wrote:
| Your insistence that access, peering and infrastructure
| costs equal $0 couldn't be further from the truth, and
| unmetered doesn't mean infinite, so your entire premise is
| false to begin with. Vimeo is not running on a $100/mo
| server, and that you believe you understand their costs
| better than they do is ridiculous and shameful.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You're generally correct although it's slightly more
| nuanced. There are places in the world where peering isn't
| free (eg Australia) and even mandated by law not to be (Eg
| SK).
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| I'm not saying the peering itself is free (it depends
| wildly, peering conditions/agreements are setup on a
| case-by-case basis often), but the amount of TB/month you
| include in the peering is not something I've seen before.
|
| Could you share what law mandates that traffic has to be
| priced by amount send in a time interval in peering
| agreements? Or is this just a misunderstanding?
| technobabbler wrote:
| Where can you get a gigabit host that serves many TB a
| month for $100?
|
| Not being sarcastic, genuinely interested in such a
| service.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| Easy, search for "unmetered dedicated server", bunch of
| offers all over the place. Many hosters also have "server
| auctions" where you can rent second-hand servers that are
| already setup but the one who initially ordered it
| stopped using it, those are also cheap.
| technobabbler wrote:
| That's awesome, thank you. I did not realize hosting
| prices were so cheap now... good to know for the future.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| You're not alone! So many people are being "brought up"
| in the web/server world only knowing cloud hosting which
| is super expensive, and not many know about the "old
| world" of dedicated instances. Prices haven't changed a
| lot for a long time, for as long as I know, just that
| people are being steered to use cloud more and more.
| ozim wrote:
| How reliable are those "unmetered old world hostings",
| because "old world" hostings for me mean they can go down
| any time and I can call them as much as I want and no one
| will pick up.
|
| If AWS is down I don't have to call anyone, half of the
| internet is already twitting/posting it and they will be
| up quite soon.
| mkishi wrote:
| It's the customer's fault they didn't know Vimeo is losing
| money? A pretty big reason for that could be that they've
| been with Vimeo for over a decade in some cases and have
| always been led to believe they were paying for the service
| they were getting.
|
| 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?
| hackernewds wrote:
| I wouldn't read it as entitled since other companies have
| found models that can successfully support revenue scaling
| with distribution
| shuckles wrote:
| Vimeo is losing money, but cost of revenue is only 26% of
| sales. This is an upper bound on hosting fees, since it also
| includes platform fees, card processing fees, building rents,
| and customer support.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| It's not even a sensible or pro-rated increase.
|
| Just a shakedown.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Tell that to Sunny Singh, the other Vimeo user who was
| featured in the Verge article, who did the math himself and
| had to admit that he was costing Vimeo $2500/yr.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| A customer shouldn't really need to concern themselves with
| the profitability of a service provider though. The price
| Vimeo demanding is reasonable - what's not reasonable is
| hiding that prices could increase, and being basically as
| opaque as possible about the conditions to trigger that
| increase and what the increased cost was.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| Are you talking about this?
| https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481511608979533826
|
| If so, he is not saying that he is costing Vimeo
| $2500/year, he is saying what amount of bandwidth he has
| "consumed"/"produced" from Vimeo, which for sure doesn't
| cost Vimeo $2500/year, as otherwise they would be bankrupt
| by now. They pay static sums for the internet connection,
| no TB/$ crap that people using cloud are used to.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Except the point seems to be getting her to leave, not giving
| her a thoughtful way to stay.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| "We want you to leave" is a pretty ok thing for them to
| say. "You have a week to leave" is not. It's sleazy and
| unprofessional, and it's a signal that it's best for anyone
| to avoid them in the future.
| kingkawn wrote:
| they probably don't want to be known as forcing users out
| unilaterally, so a false offer becomes the diplomatic
| move, now backfiring from public exposure.
| apotheon wrote:
| This also seems like a great way to get everyone to leave.
| If what I wanted was a B2B platform, I wouldn't choose one
| with a history of suddenly changing its policies and only
| giving one week to catch up.
|
| In fact, it's often much more difficult for a larger
| business to move that quickly than an independent user.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| Bingo!
| notatoad wrote:
| coupled with the "we are a B2B solution" statement, i think
| they're trying to shake down patreon, not the individual
| creators - it sounds like vimeo wants patreon to start
| sending them money.
| kfarr wrote:
| FYI Update from Vimeo CEO posted Friday
| https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi...
| (disclaimer I am a Vimeo employee)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Am I the only one that thinks 2TB is pretty low for a plan that
| costs $75/month?
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| It is low for just bandwidth, but I imagine the assumption is
| that it also represents the relative scale/cost for
| transcoding, storage, etc, as well. It still isn't cheap
| compared to diy, but that's what you're paying for, I guess.
| detaro wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| 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.
| detaro wrote:
| I didn't claim Vimeo uses AWS.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I was just pointing to an example of not streaming from
| the cloud. Vimeo uses a combination of GCP and Fastly I
| believe https://cloud.google.com/customers/vimeo
| smileybarry wrote:
| 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 using Akamai.
| detaro wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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
| <embed> tag ...
|
| I don't think this was a good move by Vimeo, but maybe
| they're doing so bad (financially, as I think their
| product is great) that they don't really have a choice.
| omnimus wrote:
| 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".
| technobabbler wrote:
| Cloudflare charges by the minutes delivered though, so if
| one of your videos unexpectedly gets popular, your
| monthly bill might spike up. That's a scary level of
| unpredictability when you're a small team (or lone wolf)
| that doesn't know ahead of time how viral a video would
| get.
| jahewson wrote:
| 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.
| smileybarry wrote:
| I didn't think it was fair to use CloudFront as the only
| example for CDN pricing, when it's one of the more
| expensive ones. Granted, I used an extreme counter-
| example but the point was that implying "this customer
| costs them $80-$120/month" is misleading (and wrong).
| ugjka wrote:
| 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
| smileybarry wrote:
| Not the same, but I wanted to present the counter-point
| that bandwidth in general is not as expensive as AWS and
| such make it out to be. Hetzner is an extreme counter-
| example but I thought that just using CloudFront's
| pricing in this thread is misleading as well.
| iamevn wrote:
| How so? What's a few hundred extra milleseconds for
| packets to transfer when you're streaming video with many
| seconds of buffer time?
| brycelarkin wrote:
| 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.
| Pooge wrote:
| Do you think this will lead to the downfall of Vimeo? How are
| you and your colleagues interpreting this move?
| evancoop wrote:
| There are a few issues here.
|
| 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!
| alone1987 wrote:
| coward123 wrote:
| In my work, I have to create and share a lot of videos, and Vimeo
| is superior to YouTube for my needs. Doesn't auto-play some
| unrelated content when they are done with my videos, I can easily
| make basic edits like a custom thumbnail or branding, and it
| doesn't cover it in their own branding like YouTube. Integrates
| better into my site as well. So yeah - Vimeo is better than
| YouTube for B2B needs.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Another key feature: I can replace the file and keep the URL!
| deadalus wrote:
| Vimeo Alternatives :
|
| Centralized : Youtube, Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube,
| Vidlii, DLive, Triller
|
| Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
| vishnumohandas wrote:
| Cloudflare Stream[1] might be good fit for some use cases.
|
| [1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
| beebeepka wrote:
| metacafe? the true indie tube
| nathanyz wrote:
| Throwing in us as well, Swarmify
|
| Billing based on views instead of bandwidth
| cronix wrote:
| How much of the video has to be watched to be considered "a
| view?"
| nathanyz wrote:
| Views with us are more comparable to page views than a
| video play. So definitely higher than actual plays.
|
| We give such a generous amount that this is only more
| expensive than other providers in a limited set of use
| cases.
|
| This Vimeo policy change has been really good for business
| since we can also automatically convert all existing Vimeo
| embed over to us.
| hnbad wrote:
| These really feel more like YouTube alternatives. Are there any
| alternatives to Vimeo as a B2B service (e.g. hosting unlisted
| videos embedded behind paywalls)?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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]
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think it is more "it is impossible to build a business around
| free streaming that can compete with YouTube"
|
| It doesn't matter how good the product is, the space is just
| not profitable.
| lelandfe wrote:
| I think it's less "because we can't be bothered" and more
| "because we don't want to compete with YouTube"
| darknavi wrote:
| "Can't afford to compete" would also be accurate.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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).
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Early on yes, but today YT is at least a $100b company by
| itself.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Doesn't mean it makes money.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| doesn't matter
| sidibe wrote:
| Most of what youtube needs is the non-time-critical
| filler of Google's workload so it's pretty flexible and
| cheap to host in whatever space is free in Google's data
| centers, which are already the most efficient ones. And
| with such a large amount of compute needed they can
| justify hiring a lot of people to optimize every little
| part of software and hardware involved with Youtube.
|
| Google's infrastructure scale is such a big advantage for
| Youtube compared to competitors
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I happen to _really_ like Vimeo 's UX.
|
| 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.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Just a side rant, but Vimeo always had this perception (to me),
| that it was a Ruby of Rails clone of YouTube. It had that very
| clean minimalist pastely UI with very easy to understand player,
| but always felt static.
|
| 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.
| hitovst wrote:
| Considering the practices of Youtube, Vimeo, and the like, I
| don't understand why bittorrent feeds aren't used more often.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Can you tap a link to a torrent and watch the video it contains
| on your phone? If the answer is "no" then I think this is the
| answer to your question.
| worldmerge wrote:
| With webtorrent JS, yes.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| But it doesn't have the infrastructure to handle different
| resolution delivery based on connection speed and such, on
| good connections sure but on unreliable connections it's
| not the same story.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Yeah, it's almost like people who make things for a living want
| to be paid for things they make or something. Don't they know
| that I deserve everything for free because I know how to apt-
| get transmission?
| arkitaip wrote:
| Vimeo is dying. There is no way they can stay afloat abusing
| their tiny and shrinking user base with an increasingly
| exorbitant pricing.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| IBM disagrees.
| arkitaip wrote:
| "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Vimeo" isn't a thing.
| 0898 wrote:
| I also use Vimeo as a B2B solution and the "indie YouTube" side
| really frustrates me. Every time I search my own videos to find
| something, Vimeo defaults to scouring all its public videos and
| throwing up all kinds of twee college projects and thumbnails
| with laurel wreaths from film festivals.
|
| Now Vimeo is grown up I wonder if it's time it decided what it's
| going to be.
| corobo wrote:
| 2TB feels like a really low 99th percentile for a video site. Is
| Vimeo really that small?
|
| I've always seen them as more a backend provider for paywalled
| video content, makes sense they'd lean into that audience
| nacs wrote:
| It's not much at all in the days of 1080p @ 60fps and 4k
| videos.
|
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| They're doing a horrible job at "B2B" atm then. Have a client
| that is thinking of using them, and I'm starting to think that
| Vimeo is a "Bad Idea". I can't safely or with any confidence
| advise them what their costs are going to be a few months down
| the line. You know it's a bad sign when you have to go through
| a sales or "contact us for a custom plan" process in order to
| get details. That's not B2B anymore, that's now "B 2
| VeryLarge-B".
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| 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.
| lelandfe wrote:
| 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
| detaro wrote:
| 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".
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| Interesting. There's one Patreon I subscribe to that used
| Vimeo. I didn't realize it was what Patreon apparently
| exclusively used? This sounds like a BIG problem for
| Patreon, then.
|
| This may be a much bigger issue than I thought...
| rdtwo wrote:
| I think that's the point. If you are running b2b services
| it's a shakedown of small business clients
| sgc wrote:
| I think a lot of people here offer b2b services that are
| not shakedowns.
| rdtwo wrote:
| You misunderstood. The small b2b are the ones getting
| shook down. Small b2b content providers are getting hit
| with huge cost so they can buy time to migrate off
| sgc wrote:
| If you meant that Vimeo is shaking down small business
| clients, that might be true. But the way you phrased
| things it sounded like you were saying small business
| services in general are a shakedown, and Vimeo was just
| another example of this.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I just think they should have given users much more warning, so
| they have time to migrate.
| [deleted]
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Nothing businesses like to see more than "we'll hike your
| prices 17x with a week's notice".
|
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They seem to host a lot of recorded webinars and courses that can
| be made behind paywalls or memberships
| rdtwo wrote:
| I think it's a shakedown of those users. They probably think
| they can get a big cash infusion while those people migrate
| out. If you had a business hosting training videos then 1 week
| isn't enough time to migrate you might end up eating a month or
| 2 at extortion pricing
| cinntaile wrote:
| This doesn't sound like a good long term strategy, you're
| losing a lot of goodwill from your small paying customers and
| they'll jump ship when the opportunity arises.
| rdtwo wrote:
| It's a good short term play. If you extract 3k instead of
| 70/month you basically get paid for 3 years in one month.
| Clients are lost but good will isn't that valuable when you
| have given up on growing and moved to extraction
| worldmerge wrote:
| Is is possible to do password protected torrent streaming? Like
| uploading your videos as a torrent and having webtorrent stream
| them only if a password was given?
| remram wrote:
| You could (and should) encrypt.
| yashap wrote:
| > 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.
| teraflop wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if "99th percentile of users" is
| calculated across _all_ user accounts, including ones who
| logged in once a decade ago and never uploaded a video.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Wouldn't you expect that number of 1% for essentially any
| content uploading. Where out of every group of users, 80% don't
| interact at all, another 19% only comment, and the last 1% are
| the only ones that do anything more than comment?
| throwaway27727 wrote:
| Apparently her videos are multiple-hour long. So, caveats
| applied.
| yakak wrote:
| It probably could be expressed in a more resource
| representative way, but being in their top 1% and therefore
| needing to negotiate a custom plan apparently only requires
| 2TB of monthly bandwidth.
| [deleted]
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| To be fair more than 9 out of 10 of youtube users don't get
| +10K views too...
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I have to give it to YouTube they are keeping tons of obscure
| videos alive. For years.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 100,000 views = will come out to 100 dollar payout on
| youtube.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| "top 1%" with these figures tells you more about the problems
| Vimeo have than anything else, surely. Even if they are all
| very long videos.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hannasanarion wrote:
| They left out a crucial detail: all of her videos are 4-10
| hours long.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| foepys wrote:
| 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.
| scruple wrote:
| I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit
| more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for
| videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers
| and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices
| in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because
| they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have
| that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that
| nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had
| to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My
| co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into
| the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are
| on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python
| script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just
| works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
| lawl wrote:
| 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 $3500 is ridiculous.
| skuhn wrote:
| At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN
| traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte
| transferred.
|
| Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain
| competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a
| value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
| manquer wrote:
| Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have
| CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that
| outrageous.
|
| A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex
| than you say. There are plenty of open source software you
| could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers
| with similar features a lot of money for .
|
| For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the
| markup, but those skills are really valuable.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do
| it for you.
| foepys wrote:
| Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time
| position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for
| you for a few hundred bucks.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up
| work, 3500$ a year isn't bad.
|
| Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean.
|
| If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure
| one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting
| service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect
| you'd end up losing money.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what
| they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less
| of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy
| to do to people.
|
| It does create a market opportunity for small shops /
| agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup
| would be fair, since you can template the server
| deployments and set up small business video hosting
| pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one
| page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like,
| and scale your hosting to their plans.
|
| Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in
| this market. They need a visionary, but they've got
| conservative plodders.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server
| for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..
| hkt wrote:
| I suspect not. A VPS on the order of PS10/month could do
| this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options
| at PS50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up
| standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up
| someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging
| platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the
| outlay of the first either.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Please tell me how streaming a few hundred hours of video
| needs to cost 25 bucks? Even at top resolution.
| verelo wrote:
| Cheaper to mail out dvds
| bragr wrote:
| Maybe to mail them but not to have them made.
| crumpled wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "have them made" You can
| definitely do it yourself on-demand for less than a
| couple bucks. I think you could have a semi-pro looking
| package, and still do it yourself for less than $10
| verelo wrote:
| Maybe it's a generational thing. I used to buy 50 packs
| for $25 AUD, the cases were the most expensive part...if
| you really needed them.
| hammock wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| The problem is that the acount in question would be a
| "low" to "midling" usage account in youtube or twitch
| terms. The kind where your friends tell you "just keep at
| it and one day you might find success".
|
| Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are
| free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso
| or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo's
| rights or freedoms.
|
| The idea behind service providers is that they pool
| together many similar needs and serve them more
| efficiently than individual users alone could. For
| example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts
| who need an optimisation to make their video serving more
| efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo.
|
| Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn't
| have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it.
| That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business
| with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who
| is a paying customer of them now is better get off and
| quick.
| [deleted]
| menzoic wrote:
| Because it will save them money on all videos that aren't
| fully watched. Great ROI
| tootie wrote:
| I think this announcement is firmly stating that they
| don't have the volume of small customers for that to be
| economical. YouTube can spend tens of millions a year
| shaving every last byte off their egress because they
| have such enormous volume that is pays off in aggregate.
| Vimeo can't do that so they don't try.
| PlanckMeasure80 wrote:
| Vimeo does a rolling buffer. It's annoying when you're
| trying to download videos.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| Meh, I could host it in my data center for under $100/mo.
| Transit is like $0.1/mbps/month.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Cloudflare (and, obviuosly, vimeo) allows for good
| scalability and provides plenty of services underneath.
| You would need to code a lot of stuff to provide
| scalability (like imagine that your video became virus
| and thousands of people want to watch it at the same
| time, that's hundreds of gigabits of traffic). You would
| need to recode it for different devices. You would need
| to recode it for different network speeds. You would need
| to make reliable backups to prevent data loss.
|
| Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple
| gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good
| enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot
| of money for sure.
| manquer wrote:
| viral traffic is possible if the video is free and
| public. Her videos are subscriber only. Scalabity is not
| a factor.
|
| A simple video tag is good enough, you can store it on
| object storage (anyone but s3) . This she should do
| anyway for backup, any provider can kick her out for
| copyright violations and block her access to her own
| content.
|
| Transcoding is not that difficult anymore video editing
| software allows you to transcode for the web directly .
| Unlike 5-10 years back every brower recognizes mp4 h264
| today just one file is adequate.
| NavinF wrote:
| I've implemented literally all of those things besides
| >100gbps which is a totally different discussion. I also
| had the additional constraint of realtime GPU encoding
| and low latency live streaming. Without that, the 1 year
| project would have been a weekend project.
|
| And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve
| the problem that this thread is about.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake
| them down for, right?
|
| An existing customer?
|
| With no reasonable notice?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a
| legit customer.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| She was already a paying customer, willing to pay them
| the price _they_ had set before (which might have been
| too low, but that 's their fault then, not hers). So up
| until this point she was a paying and "legit" customer.
| And they didn't know if she would be willing to pay
| significantly more if they asked for that.
|
| >"I was already paying $200 a year [...]. Her quoted
| price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her
| content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
|
| A week's notice for a 17.5x price hike you unilaterally
| declared? That's not what you should do to such a
| customer, ever. To me, that's either a shakedown, or a
| deliberate step to make her stop using the service, e.g.
| because such "small" account are no longer worth your
| time, or you try to be a b2b business now, and those
| "small" customers do not fit with that image, or
| whatever.
|
| If something changed for vimeo that increased the their
| own expenditures over night, then I'd have a little more
| understanding for them. But that's not what they said or
| even hinted at happening.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| > If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a
| legit customer.
|
| If they're not willing to pay a hefty premium for it? I
| don't follow your comment, buddy. They're already a
| paying customer paying what was asked of them.
|
| Why would you not just use Cloudfare Stream or another
| option and save roughly 40% of the cost?
| ziml77 wrote:
| If Vimeo has no value-add, then that's what people should
| be doing. It's not like Vimeo is a platform for content
| discovery like YouTube so it should be no problem for
| anyone to switch.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| Right. Vimeo has a pleasant player. I like it.
|
| However, it's essentially the same service otherwise.
| Point your customers or business partners to a URL and
| they stream it from there.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| It's basically a fact that she's underpaying for what
| she's using. That she gets no value out of the service
| isn't the fault of the service, she's just literally not
| using the service. Since that's the case she shouldn't
| use the service and use a different service that actually
| does what she wants and has the correct value proposition
| for her. It sounds like that's exactly what's happening
| and there's no problem anywhere. There's lots of comments
| here pitying vimeo for losing "customers" like her but
| err, vimeo's the one kicking her out. She gets on a
| service that's more appropriate for her, vimeo gets rid
| of a money losing customer. Everyone wins.
| omnimus wrote:
| It's what everybody will start doing. This will be bane
| of Vimeo. You must realize most of the cinematographers
| or people in creative industry don't even know about
| alternatives. Vimeo had great MOAT exactly because they
| were "youtube for creatives".
|
| Also services like cloudflare stream/bunnycdn stream/mux
| are fairly recent.
|
| Another issue is reuploading of all the media. It's not
| that easy to switch. But people will flee to some other
| solutions.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > 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.
| totetsu wrote:
| Now I have fomo for all those cool indie films, dances,
| animations etc, that are going to be deleted before I ever see
| them.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| This is my first thought also. I wish I had all my favorites
| bookmarked, so I could download them myself.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| 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.
| sltkr wrote:
| Anyone can upload their content to Archive.org if they want
| to preserve it for posterity.
| tssva wrote:
| According to Wikipedia as of November 2020 Vimeo had over 200
| million users. I imagine most of those users have never uploaded
| a video, have upload very few for a limited audience or haven't
| uploaded a video in quite a while. I believe I have a Vimeo
| account that I haven't thought about for years and might have
| uploaded a video to years ago upon first signing up. The fast
| majority of their users are likely using no bandwidth. According
| to the same Wikipedia article as of November 2020 they had 1.6
| million paying customers. I would wager that their paying
| customers account for the majority of bandwidth usage. 1% of 200
| million is 2 million which means it is likely almost the entirety
| of their paying customers and a good number of active uploading
| non-paying customers fall within the top 1% of bandwidth users.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This 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
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Nobody wants to download a 20GB 4K video when you could just
| watch it online and have a bookmark.
| ModernMech wrote:
| It's so funny how that discussion goes exactly the same as the
| discussion in this article. It's like, you could have predicted
| all of the comments here before they were even posted.
| dang wrote:
| That's true of surprisingly many follow-up threads--nearly
| all of them in fact. Most don't contain significant-enough
| new information to budge the gravity of the discussion.
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| Ah, did not see this one, sorry!
| judge2020 wrote:
| That one didn't have vimeo's response IIRC so this is still
| useful.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Unlisted YouTube video or Patreon's native video sharing both
| sound more appealing than some direct download.
| slenk wrote:
| Unlisted Youtube Videos aren't great for content producers
| though, because if the URL ever gets posted publicly you are
| screwed.
| shuckles wrote:
| For what it's worth, I think Vimeo doesn't have great
| authentication support. Most of the Patreons and
| Kickstarters which I know used it for distribution had a
| single word password to gate access to content.
| slenk wrote:
| Ahh, I haven't used Vimeo much. I just know thats the
| issue a lot of creators have with youtube
| hyperx1987 wrote:
| pictur wrote:
| a better alternative to vimeo is pretty easy to create. It's
| weird that they take themselves so seriously.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Please go ahead. A cousin comment says the economic is against
| you, and I heartedly agree with that.
| ximus wrote:
| Feels like Vimeo missed an opportunity to be the home of
| creatives.
|
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Sounds like they tried and found it wasn't sustainable.
| omnimus wrote:
| It was surely sustainable their revenue is plus 200mil year
| and the product haven't changed much over the years.
|
| It's not growing enough for shareholders though. But
| sustainable is not the right word.
| dbbk wrote:
| But they've been losing money for the last 3 quarters.
| They're not profitable right now.
| dlsa wrote:
| A clear pivot. Yet it will definitely anger plenty of people.
| Like... a lot of people. Still, I don't appreciate the apparently
| short notice they gave. That's a significant change in their
| terms I'd be wary of in future. _Something_ happened and there
| was a knee-jerk reaction or decision made. Not sure if I read
| that right however.
| yolodump wrote:
| sandbags wrote:
| I find it ironic since they essentially booted me off their
| platform for creating some vaguely-commercial content (I was a
| paying customer at the time). Left a very sour taste in my mouth
| esp. since other people they seemed to ignore.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Wasn't the indie side their original spin ?
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 - March 2022 (223
| comments)
| skizm wrote:
| YouTube was losing over a billion dollars per year for a long
| time. It is going to be tough to take them head on as a direct
| competitor.
| sofixa wrote:
| For all we know, they still do. Alphabet don't publish YouTube
| specific expenses.
| fullmetalpower wrote:
| welp! time to forget about Vimeo... forever that is...
| andry1987 wrote:
| FastoCloud can provide video hosting on your servers. it will
| cost 25$ per month From your side need to have server near with
| your auditory.
| eps wrote:
| Keep spamming and they will add an auto-ban by FatsoCloud as a
| keyword.
| whiddershins wrote:
| What is the YouTube alternative, then?
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I strongly recommend indie creators use a personal domain link
| for each video that they publish. For our indie conference --
| Handmade Seattle [0] -- we own the link to someone's talk.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://media.handmade-seattle.com
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Off topic, but thank you for the link. There are some very good
| talks there. I'll give a brief summary of 3 I picked to watch.
|
| 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.
| Tretiotrr wrote:
| Yeah that's why people like to underestimate that paying for
| YouTube makes sense.
|
| 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.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| 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.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| You do know that Amazon acquired twitch, right?
| corobo wrote:
| For VOD content?
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| #nerdoutrageporn
| fareesh wrote:
| We have used Vimeo for some corporate clients' customer facing
| websites.
|
| 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.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| We've been using Wistia for 2 years for our business that
| serves Security Awareness Training content directly in Slack.
| It works perfectly fine. The pricing isn't that bad either. It
| seems like Vimeo is going after this type of market. Which is
| totally fine. I think the biggest issue with the current
| situation is just how little notice Vimeo gave the client in
| question. 90 days is a pretty standard price increase notice
| for B2B. They should have just done that.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Wait, so Vimeo removes videos of paying customers, and does not
| even tell you why/let you talk to a human about it to
| understand and appeal the decision?
|
| It's one thing when a free service does this, but a paid
| provider?!?
| neurostimulant wrote:
| If you just use vimeo for video embeds, you can upload the
| videos into cloudflare stream instead as it supports embedding.
|
| 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?
| gopstoptratata wrote:
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| So according to the cited creators Patreon she is now using
| Patreon's homegrown video hosting. [0]
|
| 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...
|
| [0]: https://www.patreon.com/loish
| [deleted]
| Joeboy wrote:
| Can I just like, buy some file hosting, scp AV1 files to it and
| embed them on my blog, these days?
| giantrobot wrote:
| You _can_ but you 've created a shitty experience. With AV1
| you've excluded at least half your potential viewers. Even for
| people with a browser with AV1 support your files likely have a
| higher bitrate than your viewers can stream in real-time.
|
| 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.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| This. And it seems the cost of networking is on the rise. Not
| per kb of course, but relative to the media economy at play.
| I don't see how a small player can enter the market:
|
| - 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.
| sprayk wrote:
| 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
| ModernMech wrote:
| Oh man, I love Randall Park. Thanks for this it's hilarious.
| johnohara wrote:
| 89.26% of its shares are now owned by 375+ institutional
| investors.
|
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Is there an agreed upon way to self host videos for less?
|
| 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?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Costs me zero, hopefully for a while.
| https://hirakosan.surge.sh/what-am-i-up-to
|
| 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.
| kristo8888 wrote:
| radium3d wrote:
| Is there a reason YouTube/Alphabet have not entered into the URL-
| Locked video embed business? Seems like a simple thing they could
| easily implement in a few weeks.
| [deleted]
| sireat wrote:
| I have over 500 unlisted (meaning you need to have the link to
| watch it) tutorial videos (30-180mins each) on Youtube. They are
| used for various programming classes that I teach. Each gets
| 10-100 views depending on class size.
|
| 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.
| DenseComet wrote:
| No harm in staying with YouTube for now, as long as you have a
| local copy of all your videos.
| nickjj wrote:
| Vimeo felt like a good solution for someone who might be selling
| video courses. This is a use case where you might have 400-500x
| 5-10 minute videos spread over a few courses that were streamed
| to folks who purchased one of your courses using Vimeo's embedded
| video player that's sitting in a custom site you've built.
|
| 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.
| StreamBright wrote:
| I wonder why do I watch only indie content on Vimeo?
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| So I check the Basic plan right now, it's: 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.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| The basic plan was always pretty limited. And you certainly
| aren't safe from deletion if you hit that top 1% percentile of
| bandwidth use. Keep your channels unpopular just in case.
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