Staff Blog / Presenting Vimeo Plus!
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by dalas verdugo
October 16th, 2008For years, everyone has been asking us to launch a paid account option on Vimeo.
"It's coming soon, it's coming soon!" is what you've heard from us for quite a while. Well, we weren't just making excuses. We were locked deep in the Vimeo HQ, tapping away at our keyboards, building a service that we could be proud of and that you would find irresistible.
Introducing Vimeo Plus.
We like to say "It's Vimeo, plus more awesomeness." First and foremost, it's 300% more space for your videos. This is the most frequent request from you guys, so we're glad to be able to offer you 2GB per week with Vimeo Plus. The videos you upload will have priority conversion and your SD videos will be converted at higher quality. And you thought they looked good before!
The second-most requested feature from you has been HD embedding, and Vimeo Plus makes that a reality as well. You get 1,000 HD embed plays with your Plus account, and adding more through our store is super easy. Now your website will look slicker than ever, with streaming HD video in Vimeo's well-designed player.
Speaking of the embed player, customization is the name of the game with Vimeo Plus. You have a totally liberating amount of options for your embedded videos. Now you can finally control every aspect of the player, from what's shown at the beginning and end, to the player buttons, even down to which sites are allowed to embed your video.
All of this in a completely Ad-Free environment. That's right, when you buy Plus, banner ads disappear from Vimeo, leaving you with the cleanest experience in online video sharing you can find anywhere. Stop by the Vimeo Plus page to check it out and purchase your Plus account. And if you know any other Vimeo fans, you can buy a Vimeo Plus account for them right from our store.
For those of you who are sticking with the free account, here's the deal: you're going to have some new limitations. First of all, you'll only be able to upload one HD video per week. You will also be limited to creating 1 Group, 1 Channel and 3 Albums. It really does pain us to impose these limits, because we want you all to be happy, productive Vimeans, but we feel that if you're going to be a power user, you should help us keep Vimeo working by purchasing a Plus account. We appreciate your support more than you'll ever know. The good news is that you keep all of your existing Groups, Channels and Albums, even if you remain a free account user.
Stay cool,
The Staff of Vimeo
For more helpful information, please check out our Plus FAQShowing 100 of 489 comments. Want to see the rest?This conversation is missing your voice. Take five seconds to join Vimeo or log in.
SUBMIT-
Vimeo Plus
An affordable way for you to take your Vimeo experience to the next level.
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Simple and affordable video-hosting for businesses.
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A fun place for anyone to learn how to make better videos.
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An ever-changing catalog of Vimeo's great content and active communities.
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Share your videos with communities of people who have similar interests.
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A simple and beautiful way for anyone to showcase and watch videos.
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Music Store
Discover, download, and license music for your videos.
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Get awesome discounts on the products you need.
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But that is SD footage.
booo
shame the exchange rate is so good between yen and dollars now.
no way!
I can always understand limiting things that cost more due to hardware, or strict limitations due to high cost to the provider. It just gets a little lame when you put arbitrary limits on things that most people know are not high cost to Vimeo in contrast to the new features developed.
Once it was there... now take it away?
Why not make the plus MORE expensive and leave the original vimeo as it was.?
Man, this is really stupid to restrict.
It's like bate and switch.
Anyone really wants PLUS... let them PAY a hell of a lot more... if they really want that.
I don´t care for HD (since I don´t have the hardware for it), and it´s fair to restrict it. But limiting free users to 1 group, 1 channel and 3 albums was a cheap call....
Instead of wasting weeks on hassling Visa to save a few cents on a merchant account for international payments, you guys could put some effort to acquire a good Marketing person? I think your making your base a little angry.
I love Vimeo and am stuck here ;)
"For years, everyone has been asking us to launch a paid account option on Vimeo."
Yes, that's true. A paid option was requested, and I was for it too, but taking advantage of that to remove some of the freedom of the free account is really mean. Yes a paid account, but that grows on top of the basic offering, not that takes some of it (number of groups etc and unlimited number of HD videos) and just adds a couple of insignificant things...
- HD embedding... OK, it's there, but more as a teaser as there's an even additional cost after 1000. If it's to do "pay-per-click", just offer it outside of the plus package.
- Priority upload - Never found it to be too slow before
- Video quality - was good enough, plus with the original there to download, not very important IMO
- 2GB / week - I was expecting unlimited... when you come back from an event with a lot of footage, it's annoying to have to wait weeks until you can upload everything... usually after you've uploaded those you won't be sending more for some time anyway, so it evens out, but there's no waiting to get the stuff up.
- No ads - Who doesn't use adblock nowadays? If the goal is to support the site having no ads in return is normal, but it's not a "feature".
Why limit the number of HD uploads in the free account, when it's already restricted to 500MB a week? OK so one can upload one 500MB HD vid, but not 4 125MB ones, when it would take just the same space and processing time.
In summary, I don't need the new features of the "plus" account, and I don't feel like paying just to regain the old possibilities. It's not being tight, as I would gladly support the site, its community and its spirit I find great, but this is just inconsistent with it.
Basically, it just seems that the "1 HD vid per week" and restricted number of albums etc, which are things that users know are not points that do cost vimeo more, are just casualties of the lack of new features vimeo had to offer the paying customers, so something had to be done to differentiate free and plus a bit more. And that's just the opposite of the spirit vimeo has been carrying, or at least how I've understood it.
If you couldn't find truly innovative/valuable things to offer in the plus account, you should have waited a bit more until you did, or even better asked the interested users what they wanted...
Plus taking away former "free" features is a confusing drawback (not what, but WHY).
Way to go, Vimeo. A big step in the wrong direction.
I think Plus is worth it.
* Note to self...must move to U.S. just to get a PLUS account.
this is the new big vimeo question dudes.
And by the way I'm not moving to the US and pay 700 billion$ just for vimeo plus.
Can I now make a private video, but still embed it on my private site without a password or requiring my readers to log in to vimeo?
You can now choose to only allow embeds on certain sites, which means only on your site and no where else! :)
So, does Plus change this? Thanks! :)
Motionbox allows you to embed a "private" video unencumbered, and it's a great feature for me. But they're not Vimeo. :(
But I also enjoy the community side of Vimeo, and a lot of the stuff I want to host online would fall in that classification too.
So it's this subtle feature combination that would open Vimeo up to me for both my main purposes.
Looking forward to what you folks cook up in the future. For now I think I've got to hang tight on Plus.
glad to support you guys
But we should really explore some other name options, like Vimeo ACE. Or maybe Vimeo EXTREEEEEEEME!!!!!!1!1!1