Ed_David Posted March 22, 2015 Share Posted March 22, 2015 from http://www.eddavid.tumblr.com Vimeo basically help me with my career- through a small camera test I did called, “Sexy S Log” where I tested s log on the f3 (new at the time) - an influential director and friend found me and got me into higher end commercial work. And so did so many other films I worked on. It is literally the best thing that helps me able to have a career.With that said, I have watched it since 2008 - and since then, I have noticed more and more, that there are many things it can improve. The biggest thing too is that it needs to improve, because right now, the video quality and playback is superior on youtube. Vimeo was started as an alternative to youtube in that it gave higher resolution and less compression than youtube. But youtube caught up. So now more than ever there is less reason to use vimeo than youtube, except for the community that exists there. Basically it’s a social network for filmmakers.And I think they get that - with their “Staff” people always checking out videos and commenting - I love that. You feel like you know them personally. It’s so nice.Anyway here’s a quick list of ways they could improve the interface to make it more successful as a film social network.1. have a “like” buttons. so people can like comments. or upvote or downvote a comment. a la Reddit. so there are also less, “thank you” short unnessicary comments2. the homepage should have a feed of all the videos of the people you are following. like a news streams like twitter or facebook. and allow you to hide or mute people you don’t want to follow3. allow users to quickly create “film festivals” - playlists of content that inspires them. like how spotify does it. and feature the most popular ones. Lilke curation - feature the most popular ones - the people with the most followers. Or have famous filmmakers go on vimeo and find their favorite films, like spotify.4. improve the search function - it’s still very hard to search for filmmakers5. update the user page experience - so it’s more customized to the artist. maybe more like imdb. where you can quickly list films you worked on - resume style6. show location and other things that users have - what cameras, where are they located - do they want to meet up?7. allow meet up events - film screenings, event invites - to build community - get a bunch of people together to watch films and talk about them. maybe help create a film community in smaller areas. connect people more globally8. vimeo pro - feature more vimeo pro films - it seems like vimeo pro is where a lot of the effort is going - monitization is always a good thing - but still - for non vimeo pro - maybe still create ads on the page, so that vimeo can focus on the free content as well. 9. mobile friendly - still make it more social network like on the mobile browser. 10. notifications - allow people to know when someone commented easier and your comment is responded to - like eoshd - this helps build community and discussions11. have a section just for discussion - have more forums - just for talking about filmmaking - again with minor banner ads, whats the harm, right?12. allow tags to work more efficiently - like twitter. live and die by the hashtags - to quickly allow people to find similar videos13. like netflix - have other videos if you like this, you might love - to keep people on the site, to discover new videos.the rest of my ideas is hardware based - having faster loading of videos - those are harder issues because that costs a lot of money. the ideas above is expensive too, but maybe a little less.anyway let me know what you think of all this. And I will continue of course to support vimeo - I love how there benymypony and Jonesy Jones 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turboguard Posted March 22, 2015 Share Posted March 22, 2015 AND update their codec!I export in Premiere with 1080p VIMEO setting, and still when looking at it on vimeo it looks nothing like it. It's completely crushed with tons of artifacts, harsh gradation and blocks. Ed_David 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Micah Mahaffey Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 I stopped using vimeo years ago.. The playback and quality is just to poor for my standards.. Ed_David 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Micah Mahaffey Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Also because my stuff never got seen on vimeo and got 50,000 views on youtube. Haha Ed_David 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bradtennant Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Also because my stuff never got seen on vimeo and got 50,000 views on youtube. HahaI seem to get more views through Vimeo than I do with Youtube. I really like the fact that I can add my Vimeo videos to different groups and channels that are filled with similar content. I feel like a lot of the people that I talk to don't really utilize or know about that feature. It really helps get eyeballs on your videos. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxotics Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 I've been on Vimeo from close to the beginning. I pay the $60 a year. My gut feeling is they're not making enough money to keep up with current technology. I first noticed something wasn't right when Search often timed out, or didn't work altogether. Next, Vimeo stopped working on my Roku 2. I ended up getting a Roku 3, which it works for, but that's not real solution for the market. Someone with deep pockets will have to buy them. What I'm saying is I believe they'd love to do everything Ed David said, they just don't have the money. Also, their "pro" level of pricing makes little sense to me. I don't care how much they love video, they have to deliver a service people want to buy... like Canon Ed_David 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cantsin Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Vimeo is not an independent entity, but part of IAC (InterActiveCorp), the company that owns and runs OKCupid, Tinder, Ask.com and The Daily Beast, among others. IAC has a revenue of $3 billion to which Vimeo contributes about $30 million. In other words, Vimeo is profitable while YouTube still isn't for its parent Google.Vimeo's profits almost exclusively come from its paid "Pro" subscriptions. If you work in film/media, then you'll likely know that Vimeo's publicly visible content is just the tip of an iceberg. For film producers, film festivals, advertising companies and everyone else making moving images for a living, it's now standard to preview their productions to clients, critics, festivals and other third parties via non-public, password-protected Vimeo videos. These days, even the big film festivals rarely receive DVD screeners any more but default to reviewing private Vimeo videos.This is why - speaking purely from a business management perspective -, improvements of playback quality or social functions don't matter that much to Vimeo anymore. While Vimeo's original concept and selling point was to provide a community site for filmmakers, it's just the end-user and community features that are rotten: dysfunctional search, discussions forums that became nearly invisible and are hardly used anymore since Vimeo's site redesign in 2012, largely broken groups/channel functionality, a poor mobile app (Chromecast support in the latest version is incredibly buggy and unreliable), etc.etc.Vimeo also doesn't use any technical infrastructure of its own, but runs everything on Amazon.com's AWS cloud servers.The comparison to Canon might be a good one. Just as Canon decided that the beef of their video market lies in the Cinema EOS line rather than in consumer DSLR video, Vimeo might have decided at some point that their real market lies in people using Pro accounts for non-public videos. For the latter, social and community functions don't matter. For Canon, video DSLR is now just a way to make people future customers of its Cinema EOS line, and therefore video quality is stagnating on a 2009 level. For Vimeo, the filmmaker community now just seems to be a way of making people future customers of Pro accounts, so video quality is stagnating on 2009 levels as well, and community features are slipping into bit rot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonesy Jones Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Thank you canstin for what appears to be a very imformative reply. Thank you Ed for the original post. I comment on here, not because I really have anything to add to the discussion, but because this discussion matters so much to me. The thing is, I HATE youtube. It's great for research, but each time I post something there that I have created I absolutely cringe and die inside. The viewing experience, for reasons that I cannot explain, is atrocious. And for whatever reason, my experience with Vimeo is at least better than youtube. Is it worth the $60/year I pay? To me it is, barely, and I regularly consider ending that. I think Vimeo is slowly improving. For instance a year ago their player was so frickin slow, but these days it is waaaay faster. According to either Bloom or his buddy Miller, Vimeo was testing 4K on some videos, so I think there will be progress in that respect eventually. But I guess it would be nice for us to hear from them about what is coming. Again, I do not have much to add, other than that this is important to me.Vimeo, are you listening? We like you. Please reciprocate that with some communication and transparency. Reach out to us now and then, even in this thread for instance. Ed has some good ideas. Talk to us about them. We are why you exist. Please don't forget about us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed_David Posted March 23, 2015 Author Share Posted March 23, 2015 Knowing all this, dare I say, but how hard would it be to make a video social-media site that does what Vimeo can't do?How much start up capital would it take? Especially since anyone can buy server space on Amazon? If Vimeo pulls about 30 million a year doing it, do you think someone would be interested in this concept?And if its a video site made by filmmakers, for filmmakers?Isn't that how Facebook started? As a way to improve on the shortsighting of Myspace? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigitalEd Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Is they some way to do a search and set it to show you the newest videos for that search as it opens..Bugs me that when i do a search it shows all old videos and i have then click on by date to see the new stuff ..can i change that in my account someplace to show the new stuff all the time??As for it VS youtube the Vimeo quality is so much better i can upload the same video to both and Vimeo is by far much better quality. I hate even watching youtube videos as the quality is so bad on most things. For me most youtube videos are out of focus and yuck looking for around 15 to 30 seconds till it all of a sudden pops in to the better quality it dose this on 3 PC we have here and did it in two other locations we were at on vacation.. video social-media site lets do it. Ed_David 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maxotics Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Yes, thank you Ed David and Cantsin! I've been very curious about Vimeo and Cantsin, you've finally took away the mystery for me. It is indeed a thing I value about Vimeo, getting to post videos on websites without names, logos, etc. I use it for friends/clients. NOTHING like that available on YouTube. Works great! Well worth the $60 a year. That said, getting back to Ed David's post, can Vimeo be more than it is (as Cantsin has described it)? How expensive would it be to improve search? If it doesn't work it should be taken out. I'm all for FOCUS. Especially in business. It would be nice to either do what Ed David suggests, which I agree with, or take out the stuff they just don't care about, like Roku support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cantsin Posted June 23, 2015 Share Posted June 23, 2015 To warm up an older thread - this latest message from Vimeo indicates that the company is another case of "Singularity" cult. Vimeo used to be the sane, no-nonsense alternative to nutty YouTube, but now it seems to have gone wacky itself: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed_David Posted June 23, 2015 Author Share Posted June 23, 2015 yes Vimeo is kind of confused right now - they missed the mobile vote like facebook did.Also what's the point of improved video quality on a tiny 5' iphone screen? I don't really see them surviving too much longer unless they become more of a community. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inazuma Posted June 23, 2015 Share Posted June 23, 2015 To warm up an older thread - this latest message from Vimeo indicates that the company is another case of "Singularity" cult. Vimeo used to be the sane, no-nonsense alternative to nutty YouTube, but now it seems to have gone wacky itself:I think you were a bit quick to jump to conclusions there. The rest of the email just talks about its new video editing app, video on demand (content creators can sell directly to audiences) and faster upload times on mobile. All in a pretty straight forward manner. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OliKMIA Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 I agree with all of the above and I'm going to say it: what really pissed me off was the introduction of the copyright match last year. I think it was one of the main reason why I went for a PLUS subscriptions in the first place: the ability to upload my video with the song I like. Now it get blocked and deleted right away !!!In the mean time, youtube got more and more flexible with the song copyright issue. Of course youtube put some ads on a video that use copyright soundtrack but I can live with that and it makes sense that the artists get some kind of retribution for their work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterwhite Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 Vimeo is a great tool to me, and I have uploaded many videos on it for sharing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sandro Posted July 1, 2015 Share Posted July 1, 2015 My last two videos couldn't be published due to copyright infringement. So... they should copy YT on this and let the owner monetize. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed_David Posted July 1, 2015 Author Share Posted July 1, 2015 I agree. The copyright infringement thing was a problem that could have been examined via youtubes style perhaps? The majority of films on there are by students kr those with no money. People using it as a tool. As long as the film is not for monetization. Im sure they could have implemented Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.