My Acceptable Experience Trying To Use Vimeo Video Service

Vimeo is another in a long line of online video hosting providers. It has various options for the product user that ranges from the limited freebie mode to a nice and serviceable pricey mode. Either way, Vimeo does meet your video hosting needs, to a point. But one thing is for sure, and that is that Vimeo Ain't No YouTube. If you're looking for a freebie hosting, it is a free video platform that has limitations designed to push you to either upgrade to an annual fee account, or back to YouTube. What you do, is up to you.

To be honest I get the impression that Vimeo does not like freeloaders.

Approximately 10 days ago I requested help from Vimeo regarding an account I had set up some time ago. Their policy is that if you have a free account, they will respond to your help requests in no less than three days time. That three days seems to be their default buffer for those with free accounts.

Having a free (Basic) Vimeo account means several things... it means that

    500MB per week of upload space
    Up to 720p HD
    No Priority Video Conversion (More on that later)
    No HD embedding
    No Domain level privacy
    No 4-Hour priority support
    The ability/limit to upload 10 videos per day
    The ability/limit to create 1 Channel, 1 Group, and 3 Albums
    The ability to download converted video files
    Basic-yet-robust privacy controls
    Basic embedding features

-


Also, "As long as you are following guidelines and logging in every once in a while, your account will remain intact," meaning your account will stay active. (Which I think was my recent problem, I had not been to my channel that I created a few years ago for quite some time, so they promptly removed it. Though it still would have been nice to have someone from Vimeo reply to my help request and not let me languish.

If you want more than what the free version has to offer you then for $60 per year you can get Vimeo Pus. In Plus, it seems like you get treated more like a human. You get

    5GB of uploads per week,
    Priority Video Conversion
    up to 1080p
    HD Embedding
    Ulimited Groups, Channels, Albums
    Domain Level Privacy
    4-hour Priority Support

Here's one observation about the site as a "Basic" user:

Aside from waiting for 10 days with no answer (UPDATE: They did reply, but it was filtered into a protected folder under the email system I gave them. I did not think of looking there.) from the support department, (I decided to quit trying to work with them and create a new account), when I did a test upload of a video, it was put in a queue and I was informed it would be converted in 29 minutes.I fired up a second video with the same delay of 29 minutes. I'm guessing that's what is implied as the "not" priority video conversion.

This is a very different online application than what I once tried out several years ago and it is not for the user who thinks they will fire up a video and have it ready to go in five minutes. It is still a viable video hosting option and if you have the bucks or patience, then Vimeo should be just find for the basic user. And to be honest, if that's how they have to monetize their existence, well, that's how it is because free does not pay the bills. They don't have a global advertising network supporting their service.

But I've been feeling put off by how they handle their freeloaders, I mean those who use the free version of their hosting services.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Follow or subscribe to Consumer Bits on