Vimeo

Vimeo, LLC

Screenshot of Vimeo's homepage
Type Subsidiary
Founded November 2004
Headquarters New York City, New York, United States
Area served Worldwide
Founder(s) Zach Klein, Jake Lodwick
Key people Kerry Trainor (CEO), Dae Mellencamp (President)
Parent IAC
Slogan(s) Film with a Passion
Website Vimeo.com
Alexa rank negative increase 130 (February 2015)[1]
Type of site Video hosting service
Advertising IAC Advertising
Registration Optional
Available in English, Spanish, German, French
Launched December 2004[2]
Current status Active[1]

Vimeo (/ˈvɪmioʊ/[3]) is a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view videos.[4] Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein.

Jakob Lodwick and Zach Klein, founders of Vimeo

Overview

Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein.[5] The name Vimeo was created by Lodwick, as a play on the words video and me. Vimeo is also an anagram of the word movie.[6] IAC purchased Vimeo in August 2006, as part of its acquisition of Connected Ventures.[7] In January 2009, Dae Mellencamp joined IAC as General Manager of Vimeo.[8] She served as the CEO of Vimeo until 19 March 2012 when Kerry Trainor joined Vimeo as the CEO.[9]

As of December 2013, Vimeo attracts over 100 million unique visitors per month and more than 22 million registered users.[10] Fifteen percent of Vimeo’s traffic comes from mobile devices.[11] As of February 2013, Vimeo accounted for 0.11% of all Internet bandwidth, following fellow video sharing sites YouTube and Facebook.[12] The community of Vimeo includes indie filmmakers and their fans.[13] The Vimeo community has adopted the name "Vimeans", meaning a member of the Vimeo community, usually one who is active and engaged with fellow users on a regular basis.[14] The White House posts high-definition versions of its broadcasts to Vimeo.[15] Vimeo has helped to offload traffic from Improv Everywhere's servers after new pranks are announced, and continues to host most of their videos. Vimeo was also the original location of Noah Kalina's "everyday" video,[16] a popular viral video.

On 21 July 2008, Vimeo announced that they would no longer allow gaming videos. Vimeo cited a few reasons, including that the unusually long duration of gaming videos was holding back transcoder wait times.[17] Existing gaming videos were deleted on 1 September 2008. All new uploads are currently subject to this rule, but machinima videos with a story of their own are still permitted.[18]

Video quality

On 9 October 2007, Vimeo announced support for high definition playback in 1280×720 (720p), becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD.[19] Uploaded HD videos were automatically converted into 720/30p VP6 Flash video. Since August 2010, all videos are encoded into H.264 for HTML5 support. All videos uploaded before were re-encoded. Non-Plus users can upload up to 500 MB of videos per week, and up to one HD video per week (additional HD videos uploaded within the same week are encoded to SD).

Non-HD videos re-encode at a maximum of 30 frame/s but suffer in general video image quality, which is inline with the low bitrate for videos in the 640×360 size. Usually the video content is re-encoded to bitrate below 0.5 Mbit/s. This is not high enough data rate to reproduce the fine details that can be captured from, e.g., a consumer video camera or iPhone.

Premium accounts

On 16 October 2008, Vimeo unveiled its $60-per-year Vimeo Plus package, which allows users additional weekly uploads (up to 5 GB), unlimited HD videos, unlimited creation of channels, groups and albums, no ads, HD embeds, 2-pass video re-encoding that results in higher quality, priority encoding, and more. The arrival of Vimeo Plus also meant the downgrade of the free version, which up to that point also enjoyed unlimited HD re-encodings per week and unlimited creation of groups/albums/channels. Since February 2010, Plus users can choose to re-encode their 1080p upload as either 1080p or 720p. As of 22 July 2010, the site offers unlimited HD embeds.[20] As of 4 January 2011, Vimeo Plus users can upload videos that are up to five gigabytes of footage, roughly equivalent to 2.5 hours of HD video.[21] This makes it possible for full length, high-definition feature films to be uploaded to Vimeo by Vimeo Plus users.

On 1 August 2011, Vimeo introduced the PRO account type for business and commercial use, which allows 50GB of storage, 250k plays, advanced analytics, third party video player support and more. Everyone except "small scale independent production companies, non-profits, and artists who want to use the Vimeo Service to showcase or promote their own creative works"[22] must become Vimeo PRO subscribers in order to upload commercial videos or use Vimeo for their business's video hosting needs.

Vimeo Awards

Vimeo's first annual Vimeo Awards took place 8 and 9 October 2010 in New York City, dedicated towards showcasing and awarding creative video content hosted on the site.[23] Festival judges for the nine competitive categories included David Lynch, Morgan Spurlock, Rian Johnson, M.I.A., and Charlie White.[24] The competition received over 6500 entries. Winners were chosen for each category, with the documentary finalist "Last Minutes with Oden" taking home the $25,000 grand prize. Ben Briand's short narrative "Apricot" won the Community Choice Award. The two-day festival included video screenings and workshops from the likes of Philip Bloom, Lawrence Lessig, and DJ Spooky, and an award show hosted by Ze Frank. A 3D projection-mapping displayed on the Vimeo HQ/IAC building concluded the festival. The 2012 Vimeo Festival+Awards commenced on 8 June and included speakers like Ed Burns, Loc Dao, Vincent Laforet and Jonathan Gottschall.

Censorship

Starting 4 May 2012, the site was blocked in India by some ISPs under orders from the Department of Telecommunications, without any stated reasons.[25][26] Shortly, thereafter, the ban was lifted. It was later revealed that piracy and copyright infringement of the films 3 and Dhammu were the cause of a week ban of the site in India, LH Harish Ram of Copyright Labs, Chennai, representing the makers of the two films sent notices to ISPs across the country asking them to block offending URLs. When the ISPs blocked popular sites like Vimeo, Ram wrote on his Twitter account that he had not asked for the entire domains to be blocked but only specific URLs where infringement was taking place. Contrary to what Ram claimed on Twitter, his letter about Dhammu clearly asks for 272 URLs to be blocked and these are complete URLs, not specific webpages. A copy of Ram's letter is available online. On 15 June of the same year, the Madras high court took note of the controversy and clarified that only those URLs which are infringing copyright can be blocked, not entire websites, and the ban was lifted. As of November 2014, Vimeo is accessible in India.

As of 9 January 2014, Vimeo is blocked by court order in Turkey, without stating any reasons.[27]

In May 2014, Tifatul Sembiring, Indonesia's Communications Minister tweeted from his personal account that video sharing site Vimeo would be banned. Citing Indonesia’s controversial anti-pornography law, passed in 2008, the minister said the site included displays of "nudity or nudity-like features".[28] The ban came at a moment when films made in Indonesia had begun to attract attention on the world stage, with Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing joining the ranks of the most acclaimed documentaries of all time.[29] Vimeo had been blocked in India on December 2014, due to fears that the website was spreading ISIS propaganda through some of its user-made videos.[30] However, on December 31, the site has been unblocked in India.[31]

Like fellow video-sharing site YouTube, Vimeo is blocked in China.[32]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Vimeo.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. ↑ "Vimeo on the Internet Archive". Archived from the original on 2004-12-17.
  3. ↑ "How do I pronounce Vimeo? in Vimeo FAQs". Vimeo.net. Retrieved 18 November 2013.
  4. ↑ IAC. "Vimeo". Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  5. ↑ Liz Gannes (30 October 2007). "Vimeo Founder Jakob Lodwick Leaves". GigaOm. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  6. ↑ Danny Allen (21 August 2007). "Vimeo video-sharing service review". PC World. Retrieved 28 September 2010.
  7. ↑ "Acquisition and Divestitures Timeline". IAC. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  8. ↑ "ManagementBios". IAC. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  9. ↑ "IAC replaces Vimeo CEO with former AOL exec Kerry Trainor".
  10. ↑ Sean Ludwig (24 January 2012). "Vimeo begins rolling out silky smooth redesign with huge videos". VentureBeat. Retrieved 1 February 2012.
  11. ↑ Sean Ludwig (9 January 2012). "Vimeo shows slick new video apps for Android, Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad". VentureBeat. Retrieved 1 February 2012.
  12. ↑ "Application Usage & Threat Report". Researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
  13. ↑ Vimeo et al. "The Best Indie Filmmakers". Vimeo. Retrieved 25 March 2012.
  14. ↑ Vimeo (2011). "Hey Vimeans!". Tumblr. Retrieved 25 March 2012.
  15. ↑ Uploaded 1 day ago (2008-12-09). "The White House on Vimeo". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 14 February 2013.
  16. ↑ Kalina, Noah. "everyday". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  17. ↑ Blake Whitman, "New upload rules", Staff blog, vimeo.com, 21 July 2008. Retrieved 10 August 2011.
  18. ↑ "Community Guidelines". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 1 January 2012.
  19. ↑ Lauria, Peter. New York Post [New York, N.Y] (16 Oct 2007) "Video-Sharing Web Site Goes High-Def"
  20. ↑ dalas verdugo 22 July 2010 (2010-07-22). "Global Settings and Unlimited HD Embedding". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 1 January 2012.
  21. ↑ Adrian Covert (2011-01-05). "Attention Filmmakers: You Can Now Upload Full Length Films to Vimeo...in HD". Gizmodo.com. Retrieved 1 January 2012.
  22. ↑ "Vimeo PRO Guidelines". Vimeo.com. Retrieved 12 March 2012.
  23. ↑ "Vimeo Awards".
  24. ↑ "Vimeo Award judges".
  25. ↑ Ernesto (4 May 2012). "India Orders Blackout of Vimeo, The Pirate Bay and More". TorrentFreak. Retrieved 5 May 2012.
  26. ↑ Vikas SN (4 May 2012). "Reliance Communications Blocks The Pirate Bay & Vimeo". Medianama. Retrieved 10 May 2012.
  27. ↑ "Vimeo blocked in Turkey after amendment to Internet law". Todayszaman.com. 2014-01-09. Retrieved 2014-06-23.
  28. ↑ Third Presidential Debate, 22 June 2014. "Communications Minister Faces Twitter Ire After Vimeo Ban". The Jakarta Globe. Retrieved 2014-06-23.
  29. ↑ Third Presidential Debate, 22 June 2014 (2014-05-15). "Indonesia Vimeo Ban Raises Freedom Concerns". The Jakarta Globe. Retrieved 2014-06-23.
  30. ↑ http://www.ibtimes.com/vimeo-dailymotion-pastebin-among-sites-blocked-india-anti-india-content-isis-1770814
  31. ↑ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Indian-government-unblocks-Vimeo-Dailymotion-2-other-websites/articleshow/45731251.cms
  32. ↑ , Shanghaiist

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Vimeo.

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