Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

I just recently found that Vimeo is hosting MST3K, with free playback of the original episodes (Joel and Mike).

So for selfish reasons this makes me sad. I'm guessing MST3K will need to find another host, perhaps with less generous terms.

Edit: I really hope that doesn't mean RiffTrax will also have problems.

View on HN

Hmmm... I just learned that mst3k has even more moving parts at the moment: https://www.byteseu.com/1717645/

They are also the backend for Dropout, which has just shy of 1m paid subscribers.

So I understand your selfish sadness feelings.

https://vimeo.com/customers/dropout

That's partially due to history: Vimeo was split out of CollegeHumor, and CollegeHumor became Dropout. (Both were part of IAC and were spun out/sold off.)

Dropout originally only used Vimeo for video distribution. They switched to Vimeo for OTT only after running their own with a team of developers and finding it to be an unexpectedly hard task. I think I learned that in the Sam Reich Hank Green Decoder interview.

Well, some good news is that if you've ever wanted to build a new video streaming platform there are a bunch of companies that'd love to sign up.

I'm sure dropout et all will be able to continue with their same level of functionality in the short term but I can imagine the bills they'll be receiving will be escalating quickly.

Dropout's CEO has been pretty open about the company, and he described their early efforts as 'Brutal'

> No! We tried, but people don’t realize this. The first rendition of Dropout was built on Vimeo OTT’s API, but it was our own product. We employed something like eight sophisticated engineers at IAC to build our own product around it, and it was brutal. Which is to say, it’s just very hard to do very well. And these were great engineers.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/781331/hank-green-sam-reich...

And Criterion :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com