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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Not that it excuses what's happening, or that it really puts her in the "top 1 percent"...but despite the low views, she could still be using a lot of bandwidth.

Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing.

That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I can see why she might need a higher end plan with such long videos. $25/month may not be enough to cover the bandwidth.

What's confusing, though, is that their pricing page shows the highest-tier plan as $75/month, which is $900/year and described as "Unlimited live streaming - 7TB total storage". There's also the next plan down, at $50/month ($600/year), described as "No weekly Limits - 5TB total storage". So I'm curious where the $3500/year is coming from.

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Just to compare to Cloudflare Stream which I consider a honest paid platform:

Streaming is $1 per 1000 minutes delivered

Storage is $5 per 1000 minutes store per month.

117 videos with 2 hours each and with 150 views each:

117 * 2 * 60 = 14040 minutes stored or $14/month for storage which is $168/year.

117 * 2 * 60 * 150 = 2106000 minutes delivered or $2106.

So $3500/year does not seem outrageous.

You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?

An existing customer?

With no reasonable notice?

You get it wrong, she consumed $2106 worth of service and has paid $200 so far, that is a fantastic deal for her. Vimeo then says that next year since she consumed so much she will have to pay $3100. Vimeo here takes the risk that she gets more popular and therefore will cost them even more, they have to take a premium cut to cover for that risk.

A regular hosting provider would just send her the $2106 bill, but she went to Vimeo to avoid surprise bills. But instead she has to deal with price hikes like this, note that it isn't a bill, she can just not pay for it and cancel the service, that is the product she paid for.

> You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?

Well, Cloudflare Stream is underlying tech, you would need to write some code on top of it anyway. 40% of premium does not sound like something unreasonable either.

I agree that treating existing customer like that is not a good thing. I just tried to understand whether that price is reasonable at all.

If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.

She was already a paying customer, willing to pay them the price they had set before (which might have been too low, but that's their fault then, not hers). So up until this point she was a paying and "legit" customer. And they didn't know if she would be willing to pay significantly more if they asked for that.

>"I was already paying $200 a year [...]. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.

A week's notice for a 17.5x price hike you unilaterally declared? That's not what you should do to such a customer, ever. To me, that's either a shakedown, or a deliberate step to make her stop using the service, e.g. because such "small" account are no longer worth your time, or you try to be a b2b business now, and those "small" customers do not fit with that image, or whatever.

If something changed for vimeo that increased the their own expenditures over night, then I'd have a little more understanding for them. But that's not what they said or even hinted at happening.

> If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.

If they're not willing to pay a hefty premium for it? I don't follow your comment, buddy. They're already a paying customer paying what was asked of them.

Why would you not just use Cloudfare Stream or another option and save roughly 40% of the cost?

If Vimeo has no value-add, then that's what people should be doing. It's not like Vimeo is a platform for content discovery like YouTube so it should be no problem for anyone to switch.

It's what everybody will start doing. This will be bane of Vimeo. You must realize most of the cinematographers or people in creative industry don't even know about alternatives. Vimeo had great MOAT exactly because they were "youtube for creatives".

Also services like cloudflare stream/bunnycdn stream/mux are fairly recent.

Another issue is reuploading of all the media. It's not that easy to switch. But people will flee to some other solutions.

Right. Vimeo has a pleasant player. I like it.

However, it's essentially the same service otherwise. Point your customers or business partners to a URL and they stream it from there.

It's basically a fact that she's underpaying for what she's using. That she gets no value out of the service isn't the fault of the service, she's just literally not using the service. Since that's the case she shouldn't use the service and use a different service that actually does what she wants and has the correct value proposition for her. It sounds like that's exactly what's happening and there's no problem anywhere. There's lots of comments here pitying vimeo for losing "customers" like her but err, vimeo's the one kicking her out. She gets on a service that's more appropriate for her, vimeo gets rid of a money losing customer. Everyone wins.

Put another way - this comes out to $0.12 per view for a 2 hour video (assuming low views per video).

Considering the cost of bandwidth, you can't get that much better.

Meh, I could host it in my data center for under $100/mo. Transit is like $0.1/mbps/month.

Cloudflare (and, obviuosly, vimeo) allows for good scalability and provides plenty of services underneath. You would need to code a lot of stuff to provide scalability (like imagine that your video became virus and thousands of people want to watch it at the same time, that's hundreds of gigabits of traffic). You would need to recode it for different devices. You would need to recode it for different network speeds. You would need to make reliable backups to prevent data loss.

Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot of money for sure.

viral traffic is possible if the video is free and public. Her videos are subscriber only. Scalabity is not a factor.

A simple video tag is good enough, you can store it on object storage (anyone but s3) . This she should do anyway for backup, any provider can kick her out for copyright violations and block her access to her own content.

Transcoding is not that difficult anymore video editing software allows you to transcode for the web directly . Unlike 5-10 years back every brower recognizes mp4 h264 today just one file is adequate.

I’ve implemented literally all of those things besides >100gbps which is a totally different discussion. I also had the additional constraint of realtime GPU encoding and low latency live streaming. Without that, the 1 year project would have been a weekend project.

And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve the problem that this thread is about.

They said it's a custom plan.

And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.

Vimeo does a rolling buffer. It’s annoying when you’re trying to download videos.

But why would they invest time and energy fixing a flaw for a customer spending $200/yr? That pays for like 2 hours of a senior engineer. More expedient to ask them to pay more or leave.

Because it will save them money on all videos that aren't fully watched. Great ROI

I think this announcement is firmly stating that they don't have the volume of small customers for that to be economical. YouTube can spend tens of millions a year shaving every last byte off their egress because they have such enormous volume that is pays off in aggregate. Vimeo can't do that so they don't try.

The problem is that the acount in question would be a “low” to “midling” usage account in youtube or twitch terms. The kind where your friends tell you “just keep at it and one day you might find success”.

Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms.

The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo.

Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.

With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage.

I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.

I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.

It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page.

So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai.

I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.

At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred.

Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.

Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous.

A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for .

For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.

3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.

Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.

Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people.

It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans.

Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.

Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad.

Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean.

If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.

I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..

I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.

Please tell me how streaming a few hundred hours of video needs to cost 25 bucks? Even at top resolution.

Cheaper to mail out dvds

Maybe to mail them but not to have them made.

Depends on what you mean by "have them made" You can definitely do it yourself on-demand for less than a couple bucks. I think you could have a semi-pro looking package, and still do it yourself for less than $10

Maybe it’s a generational thing. I used to buy 50 packs for $25 AUD, the cases were the most expensive part…if you really needed them.

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