Vimeo launches paid service with more features

Corrected October 20 at 11:55 a.m. PDT. Details below.

Vimeo, the popular site that lets users upload videos and share them with friends, announced today that it has officially launched Vimeo Plus, a paid service that will offer users more features for $59.95 per year.

Vimeo Plus ups the user's storage limit from 500MB per week to 2GB per week and features no banner ads. Vimeo Plus users will also be able to customize any part of the player, which will allow them to remove the playbar or decide what happens at the end of the video.

But perhaps the most controversial announcement surrounding Vimeo Plus is the company's decision to scale back the number of high-definition videos allowed in its free version. Free account users will only be allowed to upload one HD video per week, while Vimeo Plus users can upload an unlimited number of HD videos. But there's another catch: embedded HD videos can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition. Alternately, the user can pay more to keep the video in HD through the company's online store.

"First of all, you'll only be able to upload one HD video per week," a Vimeo representative said in a blog post detailing the new limitations being imposed on users with free accounts. "You will also be limited to creating one group, one channel, and three albums. It really does pain us to impose these limits, because we want you all to be happy, productive Vimeans, but we feel that if you're going to be a power user, you should help us keep Vimeo working by purchasing a Plus account."

Vimeo's decision to scale back some of its offerings on free accounts shouldn't come as a surprise. The company is operating in a highly-competitive market against companies like YouTube, Blip, Viddler, and countless others that are trying to find the best way to monetize their expanding communities.

Vimeo claims it needed to charge its users because its advertising revenue wasn't covering the cost of hosting so many videos. Now it needs to hope its user base will understand and use the paid service.

This story initially misstated the limits imposed by Vimeo. It is only embedded HD videos that can only be played 1,000 times before they're reverted back to standard definition.

[dclankford]

Correction: "HD videos can only be played 1,000 times" should read "HD video embeds can only be played 1,000 times." You can play HD content through the site itself an unlimited number of times.

[jenguevin]

Thanks to you and mikeambs for pointing this out. The error has been fixed.

Jennifer Guevin
Assistant managing editor
CNET News

[mikeambs]

I'm very excited to be a part of the Vimeo Plus community :) Nice write-up.

But it should probably be clarified that when you sign up for a Plus account, it comes with a 1,000 *off-site" HD embed views. After those off-site embed HD views are used up, the embed videos work as they always did before. But it kinda' sounds like, in your artical, that your HD video is actually down-converted to SD :P but it will always be in HD on Vimeo.

[dbroom]

The online video market is extremely competitive and it is a challenge for any group to generate enough income to keep their doors open so this move by Vimeo should not surprise anyone. Remember Stage6? Google is still trying to justify it's $1.6B YouTube purchase as YouTube searches for ways to better monetize its business. Every video site it seems is trying to figure out how to provide video for little or no cost to the content creators and make it a profitable venture. I believe video services like the one at www.veeple.com are heading in the right direction. They offer clickable, rich interactive video that looks like it could be the answer to finally being able to make money with video. No one has yet figured this thing out and I am sure more video services will either go out of business or have to change their pricing model. But it WILL get figured out and models like Veeple will most likely lead the way IMHO.