Vimeo acquires Livestream | Hacker News Reader

Vimeo acquires Livestream

techcrunch.com

138 pointsuyoakaoma29 comments

Somehow, Vimeo seems a very sympathetic company. I know it’s just a perception, but this news is nice to hear. Perhaps they can pass on this positive vibe over their acqusitions.

I've disliked vimeo ever since they claimed videos with video game footage weren't art enough to be posted there. After Stage6 was shut down in 2008, many people started to move their content over to vimeo, only to be lost when vimeo made their stance against video games.

Why dislike them? They've made a business decision to cater specifically to a niche of video producers. It's like complaining that a motorcycle repair shop won't work on your car.

Trying to use your analogy I would say its more like taking your harley-davidson to a general motorcycle repair shop who won't work on it because its not a "real" motorcycle.

They might say that but wouldn't the case be that they're not serving Harley because they can't get the proprietary screwheads for it?

In the case of games, the issue might've been IP and fair use. "Not art enough" in IP law means you might not be able to pass a fair use lawsuit for it.

I went back and found their original post[0]. It looks like they changed their stance in 2014 because video games were "no longer an outlier in our community nor a drag on our resources the way it once was".

[0] https://vimeo.com/blog/post/new-upload-rules

Isn't Twitch serving that niche now?

As far as I know, you still can't upload video to Twitch: they are focusing on livestreams. You can record your livestream, and then make it available to view, but well edited videos are rare (you'd have to make and edit the video, then stream it, then edit the VOD for length, etc)

Edit: found https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2577667-vide... which seems to indicate that you can upload video, but it seems to be rare on the platform compared to their bread and butter livestreams.

True but they store past live streams so you can watch old videos.

YouTube is still the king of "Let's Play" and edited-walkthrough formats.

That's true. Although not undisputed. Lots of great let's plays on Twitch. You don't have to watch live content. The video archive has tons of content on Twitch. So you can just go to the archive of your favorite personalities and rewatch their let's plays from months ago.

They also have a whole focused site for it - YouTube Gaming

I'm honestly surprised that's still going.

That's a really interesting observation. After reading it a couple times, I came to the same conclusion. In an attempt to explain that conclusion, my guess is:

* It's simple and clean and not spammy. It does what a video player should do - play video - and not much else.

* The artist crowd who truly care about their craft post their content on Vimeo. Thus the content I watch on it tends to be of higher quality and I may be subconsciously associating that with Vimeo itself.

It's absolutely "just a perception". Companies are not people. Never trust companies to always be "the company you knew". Leadership changes, and sooner or later someone purely motivated by profit takes the reins, and the "company you knew" is now just the next one in a long chain to screw consumers whenever it means more money.

I for one am really glad to hear that Vimeo is in the position of acquiring other companies. Glad their revenue model is working out.

Vimeo is owned by IAC, the $9 billion dollar market cap company that owns Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, Dictionary.com, and lots of others[0]. I don't think this is proof that Vimeo's revenue model is working out unless it's clear that this is being funded by Vimeo revenues and not just the broader IAC war chest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_(company)#Businesses

Jesus Christ, is everything part of a conglomerate?

Yes.

I first read it as "LiveLeak" and that sounded as a little strange acquisition.

I’m using Vimeo as the backend for my video course on how cars work. It’s working out great. They do all the storage, transcoding, subtitle hosting and provide a player. I had to code up a course player to wrap it all up with a playlist but everything else was basically solved from day 1. I even use their ‘Review’ tools to annotate the videos that my editor uploads.

It’s a great example of a business in a strong and profitable niche in an industry that is absolutely dominated by YouTube. I’m happy to give them my money.

I was investigating Vimeo's paid plans[0] as a video hosting solution for a startup client. The plans were pretty economical and compelling, and I can see why they're interested in acquiring livestreaming capabilities too.

I think this is pretty spot-on:

> Vimeo’s core business is focused around selling tools and services to professional and semi-professional video creators

Indie-produced + -distributed content is definitely a growing market that's starting to disrupt industries such as education, training, and entertainment. However you feel about Vimeo, consider that they with other companies will enable the production of brand new content that we've never seen before.

[0] https://vimeo.com/upgrade

They've recently launched Vimeo OTT also which is really cool but also kinda bonkers.

https://ott.vimeo.com/

Was initially excited at this prospect as I would like an easy to use streaming tool that's not twitch or youtube for smaller personal projects, but at $75/mo. for 5 hours of streaming this is a no go for me. Can't think of a market where that pricing makes sense.

Makes sense for pretty much any business. $75 is a drop in the bucket if you're streaming commercial events.

The market here is corporate events rather than personal side projects.

I’ve known livestream since they were called mogulus with a flash app control system. Max and the team were always innovative and passionate about live streaming. Congrats to the team on years of hard work.

I use both and this makes me fairly happy. This might mean Livestream's Procaster will get FIXED. Vimeo is known for simplicity and 'just works.'

wow I had forgotten Livestream even existed still. Used to use it here and there for free live streaming way back in the like justin.tv ustream type days

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