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Comment by scrose | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?

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I think the problem is that once you get to a certain volume of content it becomes eye wateringly expensive on Vimeo. Louis Rossmann explained this in a couple of his videos (I never bookmarked them). Even if he were to push just his repair videos (i.e. not including his opinion pieces) he'd fall into into a whole other universe of cost.

Surely the issue is that Vimeo doesn't have Google's adtech behemoth behind it, so either the creator or the audience has to pay for hosting, rather than it being paid for by advertising.

Peertube seems perhaps a more credible competitor in that sense, by making hosting cheaper. As long as the creators can fund themselves with Patreon, merchandise or whatever else.

I think the key issue is being able to fail over to another video site if for some reason YouTube decides you're no longer the kind of creator they want. For Rossmann I think whatever ad-revenue he gets is pocket money (and I believe it's not a lot in the great scheme of things), he already has a functioning business that's revenue generating.

Also what guarantees are there when you come along and upload 10+ TB of archive footage to Peertube the network decides that's far too much? Their creator sign up page has an instance filter for "At Least 50GB" (which is quaint). And sure when you get the results back many instances say "Unlimited" storage, but there's "unlimited" and "get lost".

Vimeo hosts the storage on google cloud. It pays 100x what youtube does for storage. The same for bandwidth, hosts on Fastly. Pays 100x+ there too for cdn compared to youtube.

What does Vimeo offer that YouTube doesn’t do better? What reduction in risk does Vimeo offer that is any different than YouTube?

DRM Free movie downloads, also it supports better quality video. Though those are things that work because they do not have the same kind of customers/creators as YouTube in general.

You're right, but that misses the point of the exodus from Youtube, people aren't leaving over DRM or video quality. They are leaving because the precarious relationship with a capricious overlord. Their livelyhoods are in somebody elses hands.

Yeah, but they are not leaving to vimeo, and vimeo are not trying to get them to use it.

> DRM Free movie downloads

This isn't even remotely related to Vimeo or YouTube. If you're talking about movies legitimately published by the rights owners not being DRM'd on Vimeo, then there's nothing stopping the studio from uploading a DRM-free version to YouTube as well. IF you're talking about piracy simply because Vimeo doesn't have Content ID, then that's also just a failure of Vimeo and/or the studios not really caring about 480p streams with relatively few views.

No I was talking about video on demand, if you try pretty much any other service for it none of them allows creators to upload drm free files for the user to download. Sure you can upload a file "drm free" to YouTube but it is not download able and there is put drm on them.

This is of course something that is unrelated to the greater discussion in this post, but it have been something I have found different on vimeo compared to elsewherein the past.

You continue to, willfully, argue a point nobody cares about. Nobody cares about Venmo, it’s a crappy YouTube. The issue is creating content on big techs platform and the danger it entails.

Vimeo's much bigger in the film festival scene, for example. It's one of the primary ways films are submitted to small-to-mid festivals. It has a whole infrastructure for that - e.g., I upload my film once and then can manage submissions to different festivals from there - and if you're not in that industry you wouldn't ever see that functionality.

What Vimeo and Dailymotion lack is audience. People still post on Youtube because they still get the most views there.

Independent short films, animation, motion graphics - this is what Vimeo is associated with and the image they have cultivated of their brand.

You'll find other types of content, but Vimeo is not try to compete with YouTube's content scope. You won't find 'How to unblock your kitchen sink with baking soda' on Vimeo, or 'Learn Javascript in 60 mins', but you'll find these (and dozens more) on YouTube.

There's not much value add. Youtube is all about reach. It has 1000x the reach of vimeo. Once you've solved your reach issue, the most cost effective is to build your own platform (or white label something) and collect more revenue.

Lack of solid discovery and yes less audience.

But I would rather talk about the similarity between Vimeo and YouTube - they both are walled gardens. I would rather have many Vimeos that federate.

This discoverability on vimeo is poor to terrible.

Youtube feeds me a diet of videos that are hard to turn off, spanning literal decades and with some really weird stuff thrown in (and based on the comments, others have same experience - I'll be on a 10 year old video with positive comments from a day ago).

A common youtube quote:

No one: I want to see five year old archery videos Youtube: Here, try this

Community, moderation, UX, and that's not where all the creators are....

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