Vimeo Launches a Network

Posted March 11, 2016

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There's Youtube.

And then there's... um... what is that other one? You know, the one that where all the 'filmmakers' put their stuff... You know, the "film makers"... 

Oh yeah

Vimeo

What ever happened to Vimeo?

As we said yesterday, the Internet is a winner take all game.  There are no competitors to Amazon or Google (whatever happened to Ask Jeeves?). Find me that competitor to Airbnb.  

So when you try to be the competitor to Youtube, it's a lost cause before you even get started.

That was the situation that Vimeo, founded in 2004 by Jake Ludwig and Zach Klein.  The name was an amalgam of Video and Me.  

Considering that Youtube was founded in 2005, Ludwig and Klein should have owned the field. But they didn't, because in 2006, Google bought Youtube for what was then the astonishing amount of $1 billion.  (today that barely buys you an apartment on W. 57th Street).

So Vimeo found itself in a kind of cul de sac, the dead zone of Internet wanna be's (see MySpace).  And there it has languished, extolling its benefits of 4K and so on.  As I said, indy filmmakers.

But now, Vimeo has an idea. Instead of being a kind of storeage space for video, it is going to turn itself into a network - like Netflix or Amazon.

It might just work.

There is lots of content floating around, a good deal of it hard to find (tomorrow we'll talk about The NY Times' video aggregator site), and a great deal of it non-monetized. (That means, 'mom, did you watch the movie I made yet? It's on Vimeo.. Vimeo.  Vimeo dot com. yes)

Vimeo actually has a few very good series online already. Its first series, High Maintenance is apparently being turned into a series for HBO.  Vimeo is plowing $10m - $12m into original programming this year. It's not the $6B that Netflix says they're going to spend, but it's a start. And not a bad one.

Youtube is not far behind with YouTube Red, which launched in February.

Both are designed to generate revenue from non-linear viewers. YouTube Red charges a flat $10 a month whereas Vimeo charges on a per view basis. But both intend to make money and both intend to pay the content creators for their work.

It's an interesting development and a good one for those of us in the 'Indy' business.