Vimeo

Vimeo is a video sharing and services platform headquartered in New York City. It was founded in November 2004.

Vimeo operates on an ad-free basis, deriving revenue by providing subscription plans for video content producers, offering software as a service with video creation, editing, and broadcasting tools, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals, and focuses on the delivery of HD video across a range of devices.

2004-2009
Connected Ventures, the parent company of CollegeHumor, founded the site in late 2004 as a side project of web developers Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein to share and tag short videos with their friends.

The idea for Vimeo was inspired after CollegeHumor received a large number of views from a posted video clip of the 2004 Saturday Night Live show that included Ashlee Simpson's lip-syncing incident. The name "Vimeo" was created by Jake Lodwick as a play on the words Video and Me. As CollegeHumor was drawing in audiences, Vimeo was put to the side while JK&ZK focused on supporting the main CH site. Vimeo's user base grew only by a small amount during the next few years principally by word-of-mouth.

In August 2006, IAC acquired a majority ownership of Connected Ventures as they were drawn by the success of CollegeHumor, which was bringing around 6,000,000+ visitors a month at the time. In reviewing the assets of CV IAC discovered the Vimeo property; this had came at the same time that Google had acquired YouTube for $1,65+ billion on October of the same year.

By the start of 2007, IAC had directed Lodwick, Klein, and Andrew Pile to work on its full time and expand Vimeo's capabilities to differentiate themselves from YouTube that had appeared since Google's acquisition. Vimeo was focused on the content creator with better upload tools, and better curation of content on the site rather than on popularity. By October, it was the first video sharing site to offer HD content to users via Flash-based HD video playback. While IAC's acquisition of Connected Ventures helped to target Vimeo's direction, the corporate nature of IAC created issues with many of the original staff of CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Lodwick was planning to leave the company near the end of 2007, as he said that IAC's incorporation of business processes hampered their creativity, but he was fired a few weeks before that. Klein left Vimeo in 2008.

2009-2014
Vimeo began rolling out a major redesign of its site in 2009 aimed to put the user's focus on the video, which was fully completed in early 2012. The new version was aimed to feature the video playback as the central focus of the design, contrasting with numerous user interface elements that YouTube had within its layout at the time. In 2008, Vimeo announced that they will block the hosting of video game-related videos as they were typically longer than their normal content and took much of the site's resources. Vimeo did allow Machinima videos with a narrative structure, and it's not confirmed if the community went outraged.

In October 2014, Vimeo rescinded the ban. In December, Vimeo introduced 4K support, though it would only allow downloading due to the low market penetration of 4K displays at the time. Streaming of 4K content launched the following year, along with adaptive bit-rate streaming support.

2014-present
In May 2016, Vimeo acquired VHX, a platform for premium over-the-top subscription video channels subsequently offering this as a service to its sites customers. Around the same year, Vimeo had expressed its intentions to enter into the subscription video-on-demand market with its own original programming, with the intent of spending "tens of millions" on content to populate the service as to compete with Netflix. According to Joey Levin, some of the original programming would have been from content creators already on Vimeo, paid for their material to be used on the service, thus reducing their own costs in producing content in comparison to Netflix.

However in June 2017, Vimeo dropped this plan recognizing that not only that they were far behind Netflix and others in this area, but that they also had generally had far fewer potential viewers and that their ultimate goal, converting those viewers into customers of the site which would be harder.

On this move Vimeo decided to focus more heavily on supporting its content creators and customers transitioning itself away from being simply being a content-hosting or video-sharing website and move into the software as a service model. According to Anjali Sud, Vimeo saw that the demand for online video services had shifted away from Hollywood productions and media producers and was gaining more traction by large businesses, and just as it had originally drawn attention from indie film makers at its start, they saw an opportunity to help with smaller businesses needed video sharing capabilities but lacking the resources to develop those internally. The company introduced a number of tiers and services aimed for business use atop their existing services. Furthermore, Vimeo no longer competed with YouTube and/or considered itself a competitor to YouTube or other video-sharing sites, and instead called itself "The Switzerland for Creators", according to Sud. Creators were allowed to copy and share their videos to any other video-sharing site as long as they continued to use Vimeo's video editing tools for preparing their creations. In early 2017, Vimeo released collaborative review tools for its users, allowing them to privately share to other users to get feedback tied to individual frames of the video, thus keeping the video creation workflow entirely within the Vimeo service.

In September, Vimeo acquired the existing VHX service Live Stream to bolster its associated staff and technology, eventually integrated its streaming technology as Vimeo Live, another service offering for its service subscribers.

Support for High-dynamic-range video up to 8k was added in 2017, and AV1 encoding in June 2019.

In April 2019, Vimeo acquired Magisto, an artificial intelligence (AI)-backed video creation service with over 100,000,000+ users. While the deal's terms were not disclosed, the purchase was reportedly valued at $200,000,000. Through the acquisition, Magisto's staff were brought into Vimeo, and their existing userbase gained access to Vimeo's toolset. For Vimeo, they saw Magisto's technology helpful for smaller businesses that may not have the funds or skills to product professional videos and could be aided by Magisto's technology.

In February 2020, Vimeo launched Vimeo Create, the integration of Magisto's tools into the Vimeo platform to let its users easy create videos guided by AI agents from stock video footage offered by Vimeo and the users' own sources.

Good Qualities
YouTube and Vimeo are both the most popular video sites around, and at first glance they may look quite similar, but there are some key differences.

Whether one is looking for a platform to upload and share their videos, or they want somewhere to watch great quality content, there are lots of factors to bear in mind. YouTube and Vimeo both offer free services, but they also have various premium services, which differ greatly. Vimeo also allows for much higher video quality than YouTube, which encourages users to focus on quantity rather than quality.

But that's not all. To find out all the differences between YouTube and Vimeo, and pick the right one for you, read on.

Upload Limits
By default, YouTube lets its users upload videos up to 15 minutes long, but one can extend this by verifying their YouTube account.

Once it's verified, their upload limit is extended to 12 hours.

Vimeo upload limits work on a weekly basis. Basic account holders can upload 500MB per week, and can upload no more than 10 videos in 24 hours. They can upload a total of 5GB to their account.

Vimeo Plus account holders can upload 5GB video per week, and upgrading to a Pro account lets you upload 20GB per week. Neither of these plans sets a limit on overall storage space.

Pro Unlimited, Business and Premium accounts have no weekly upload caps, and allow you to store 3TB, 5TB and 7TB of data, respectively.

Video Quality
YouTube is notorious for heavily compressing video and therefore losing quality in favor of less data on their server. Vimeo presents your video as-is without any compression. In other words, your video will look as good as it did coming out of your rendering software. However, with the advancement in camera technology, the file sizes are getting ridiculously bigger.

If you upload the same video to both YouTube and Vimeo at the same resolution, the Vimeo version will look a lot better because it will have a much higher bitrate.

Branded Video Player
Vimeo has a feature that allows you to customize how the frame of your video player looks. You can match the player to your homepage, business portfolio, brand identity, or marketing campaign by tweaking its appearance. For companies, this is a means to improve users experience as well as a new play area for creativity in coloring and design. To change the text colors and upload your logo to a specific video, go to your video settings and click the Embed tab.

Customized Privacy Control
On YouTube, you don't get customized privacy controls. On Vimeo, you get a vast range of options when it comes to privacy and playback control. One of the handiest features is the ability to limit playback anywhere except on your own website or other websites of your choosing, meaning you can make your videos exclusively available on your website, which is likely to get you more visitors and higher conversion rate.

Customizable Video URLs
Vimeo also gives you the liberty of changing the URL of your video making it easier to find. This will help viewers to memorize your URL so they can focus instead on remembering the products and services being promoted in the video.

Outstanding Customer Service
The clearest win that Vimeo has over YouTube is how easy it is to contact them. The forum activity and customer service are simply ahead of YouTube. Granted, YouTube is well ahead by millions in terms of the number of people submitting queries.