Vimeo

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Vimeo

Type	Subsidiary of Connected Ventures
Founded	November, 2004
Headquarters	New York City, U.S.
Key people	Jakob Lodwick, Founder
Owner	IAC/InterActiveCorp
Website	vimeo.com
Type of site	video sharing
Registration	Optional (required to upload)
Available in	English
Launched	2004
Current status	active
Screenshot Screenshot of vimeo.com home page

Vimeo is a video-centric social network site (owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp) which launched in November 2004. The site supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content. Registered users may also create a profile and upload small user pictures as their avatars, comment and "like" videos.

Vimeo allows only user-created videos, of a "friends and family" nature. Pornography, commercial videos, gaming videos^[1] or anything not created by the user is not allowed on the site.^[2] Vimeo has gained a reputation[1] as catering to a high end, artistic crowd because of its higher bitrate, resolution, and relative HD support.

1 Origin of name
2 Popularity
3 Notable content
4 Video quality
5 Vimeo Plus
6 Gaming videos deletion
7 References
8 See also
9 External links

Origin of name

The name "Vimeo" was created by co-founder Jakob Lodwick. It is an anagram of "movie" and is also a play on the word "video," inserting the word "me" as a reference to the site's dedication to user-made films exclusively.

Popularity

As of October 2008, Vimeo has over 1,250,000 videos and 800,000 members, with an average of about 6,000 new videos uploaded daily. Roughly 15% of uploads are in HD.^[3]^[4]

Notable content

Vimeo has helped to offload traffic from Improv Everywhere's servers after new pranks are announced, and continues to host most of their videos[2]. It was also the original location of Noah Kalina's "everyday" video[3], which has become one of the most watched viral videos of all time. Comedians Kristen Schaal and Reggie Watts use Vimeo to promote their content. Popular internet series Jake and Amir uses Vimeo as its host as well. In June and July 2008, several Muppets including Beaker, Gonzo and Sam Eagle uploaded videos to the site.

Some popular Hollywood directors and their pet projects, and artistic amateur videographers (mostly from the vibrant Canon HV20/HV30 community) have found home at Vimeo because of its HD service.

Video quality

On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback, becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD. Uploaded HD videos are automatically converted into 720/24p Flash video. Vimeo tried to upgrade the frame rate of their HD videos for up to 30 fps in March 2008, but the lack of Adobe Flash's full graphical acceleration in some platforms meant bad performance to many users' PCs, which led back to the old maximum of 24 fps formula a month later. Non-HD videos do re-encode at a maximum of 30fps and they also have significantly higher bitrates than other competing video sharing sites. Non-Plus users can upload up to 500 MB of videos per week, and up to 1 HD video per week (additional HD videos uploaded within the same week are re-encoded only in SD).

Vimeo uses a variant of FFmpeg to read the uploaded videos and feed them to their encoder. FFmpeg gives Vimeo the ability to support most kinds of videos (including HDV), except some intermediate-grade codecs and the popular AVCHD.

Vimeo Plus

On October 16th 2008 Vimeo unveiled its $60-per-year 'Vimeo Plus' package, which allows users to enjoy additional storage (2 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 creation of groups/albums/channels. This created some tension[4] within the community.

Gaming videos deletion

On July 21, 2008, Vimeo announced that they were no longer going to allow gaming videos due to the fact that:

"Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo. Over these last few months they have been the single biggest reasons for our transcoder wait times."^[1]
--Blake Whitman, Community Director

This announcement has had reaction, the majority of gamers uploading videos to Vimeo oppose the change while supporters for the site have expressed acceptance for the well-being of the future of the site.

Pre-existing gaming videos were deleted on September 1st, 2008. All new uploads are currently subject to this rule.