Jump to content

Is the era of Vimeo ending?


Ed_David
 Share

Recommended Posts

It's been I think eight years of vimeo, 

And I feel that I personally go on it less and less. I don't know why. Maybe because the quality of the video compression is only slightly better than youtube? Maybe because most people are going mobile now to view video, and it's not as mobile ready?

I'm less excited by short films people post on it.  I end up skipping around a lot. I find I'm spending more time on youtube or facebook videos.

Traffic looks like it went from 20 million views to 25 million now down to 15 million in the year.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vimeo.com

It's ranking is going down on Alexa.

Is this a new era?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

EOSHD Pro Color 5 for Sony cameras EOSHD Z LOG for Nikon CamerasEOSHD C-LOG and Film Profiles for All Canon DSLRs

I hate to say it but the vimeo era is done. Sad because I was a major advocate of vimeo ! I absolutely refused to touch youtube smh. I think the issue with vimeo is their new compression scheme is terrible and goes against their theme of providing a quality service amongst other things. They grew too fast and didn't have an infrastructure in place to cater to the flood of people...now they don't know who to appeal to. Im considering cancelling my account and using youtube...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's a new era if Vimeo fails to compete.  It's a tough market.  I hope they succeed as, from what I can tell, their VOD streaming service is fair to indy filmmakers...but the tech needs to keep up.

The fact that a VOD film I have on the site doesn't pop up when doing a search of my production company name is maddening.

If anyone knows another VOD service that has a better revenue sharing scheme with equal streaming quality, please inform!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators

I'm considering moving all of my videos to YouTube.

That's coming from someone who actually loves Vimeo.

I still pay for my account to provide the download option so people can download the ProRes file to get a better idea of quality, and the community there is better quality too which tends to lead to a more constructive thread under the video in terms of comments... although sometimes a little TOO polite!

Sadly I don't think Vimeo have had their eye on the ball recently in terms of growing the site in an interesting way. Facebook groups have sucked the life out of the Vimeo groups and YouTube is sucking away the traffic. I know that if I upload something to YouTube it's going to get double or triple the attention.

So yeah, challenges ahead for Vimeo and they need a more interesting direction... but let's not knock what they've created.

Vimeo On Demand was interesting too... good to be able to make money from our work this way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Super Members
20 minutes ago, kidzrevil said:

I have to change my entire post production workflow SPECIFICALLY because of how they compress the grain and this new auto adjust quality crap they launched @Mattias Burling

Im uploading a video to Vimeo tonight with lots of grain. Then we can compare to the youtube version.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 minutes ago, BrorSvensson said:

Youtubes copyright system is so awfull though. People claming videos that are not even theres and videos that dont violate copyright laws.

At least you can use use copyrighted music on there since the major monetizes on videos. I couldn't upload my last videos on vimeo since they got deleted immediately.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I turned off my auto-repeat pay function & have until september to see if they will get anymore money out of me. They have some serious work to make their new system hum, but perhaps this is only a first step & they will start to encode with a newer/better codec so that the streaming is smoother?

The real problem is that more & more people are just watching on their phones - this is the whole internet & most websites are more mobile friendly than desktop kind. With the new update to their mobile app, it really does seem that they are trying to copy YouTube - but they are so far behind the curve that they will end up driving people away, instead of getting them to switch.

All they have to do is put back the buffer for those that want/need it - YouTube has a buffer, goddamit!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, sandro said:

At least you can use use copyrighted music on there since the major monetizes on videos. I couldn't upload my last videos on vimeo since they got deleted immediately.

Good point, i found this part of you yesterday (https://www.youtube.com/music_policies). Its a function that i think youtube should have an easier way to acces.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

I guess Video got lost somewhere in their Business Model, and they didn't catch up with the web Series, and Web Shows bandwagon. Also, their revenue model is solely based on sales (paid downloads), which IMHO isn't really viable. A lot of people who watch videos still don't wanna pay for content online. Except perhaps from places like the iTunes or other stores. Which is more commercial content, from bigger names, or content which has become famous (films like Tangerine for example). 

Also, I am curious as to how much Vimeo has been able to raise from Investors. Angels and VCs. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

Facebook groups have sucked the life out of the Vimeo groups and YouTube is sucking away the traffic.

Exactly! Vimeo was more about getting the videos they are offering, YouTube you must search more. It's incredible that Levi's jeans or Converse shoes have been the same for decades and on-line services change every two years!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I keep repeating myself on this forum, but Vimeo's real business model today are password-protected videos that aren't publicly visible on the site. Practically every production company today uses Vimeo for this purpose, for example to provide screeners of feature films to festival juries or previews of commercials for corporate clients. Since you need a paid account for providing password-protected videos, and since YouTube doesn't have a comparable feature, this is what Vimeo now seems to be focusing on, and makes its money off. Their playback only needs to be good enough for corporate/professional clients to have satisfying previews on their screens.

That means that other features do not matter so much to the site anymore. They let the community/discussion forums rot (with their major site redesign a couple of years ago) on purpose, mobile video doesn't work very well with Vimeo, and Vimeo's streaming support (on Chromecast and similar platforms) is broken, too. 

Btw., none of the issue are technical scaling issues since Vimeo doesn't use any infrastructure of its own, but runs all its services on top of the Amazon cloud (both storage and encoding servers). If Vimeo needed more computation power and/or bandwidth (for better encoding and streaming, for example), it would be simply a matter of changing its Amazon cloud services subscription plan.

1 hour ago, Mattias Burling said:

Ok here is a little comparisons.

In the sky of the very first shot its visible straight away imo. The grain is almost fully preserved on Vimeo but turned to crap on youtube.

Did you use the trick of upscaling your material to 4K before uploading to YouTube? It's often used workaround to also get better HD playback quality, and less compression much, on YouTube.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Super Members
11 minutes ago, cantsin said:

 

Did you use the trick of upscaling your material to 4K before uploading to YouTube? It's often used workaround to also get better HD playback quality, and less compression much, on YouTube.

I did, but I usually stick to 2.5K. Ive been upscaling for years :)
This was a test for specifically grain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mattias Burling said:

Ok here is a little comparisons.

In the sky of the very first shot its visible straight away imo. The grain is almost fully preserved on Vimeo but turned to crap on youtube.
(watch in 1080p of course)

Youtube just tried to smooth the whole thing out & totally ruined what was looking very nice on Vimeo - they've become 2 completely different looking videos.

Hmmm, food for thought!

One thing that must be pointed out is that since i'm using Firefox, there is a great plugin which automatically forces YouTube videos to play in your required viewing standard - 4k, 2k, 1080p etc. (wonder if they'll do one for Vimeo?). So in fact Vimeo has become exactly like YouTube?!

Damn! You just can't win against these people...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Youtube now allows paid subscription channels if you have more then 1K subscribers. I will be using this instead of Vimeo and never seriously considered Vimeo's model. I have been travelling this month and gave up trying to watch anything on Vimeo as they will not play on the wifi across this country. Google rankings for Vimeo seem to be worse. The grain example above is a big deal, but the only other positive for Vimeo I can see is the better community (less spammers and trolls), but if everyone is jumping ship that is gone. I haven't noticed a big difference in videos uploaded on Youtube compared to originals, but I don't use grain. Maybe there isn't a big difference for some curves and a bit of color, or maybe I just haven't noticed. Either way not being able to select 4K on Vimeo is the nail in the coffin. Think someone was saying you can't even select Full HD lol.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, cantsin said:

Since you need a paid account for providing password-protected videos, and since YouTube doesn't have a comparable feature, this is what Vimeo now seems to be focusing on, and makes its money off.

No need to have a payed account to password protect on vimeo..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • EOSHD Pro Color 5 for All Sony cameras
    EOSHD C-LOG and Film Profiles for All Canon DSLRs
    EOSHD Dynamic Range Enhancer for H.264/H.265
×
×
  • Create New...