14 DAY TRIAL // Vimeo has been struggling to generate some meaningful revenue while maintaining its unique community. Now it's launching a whitelabel, pro service for small businesses, offering video hosting at a rather low price.
Vimeo Pro starts at $199 per year, for 50 GB of storage and 250,000 video views. The service is aimed at small companies wanting to add a video component to their sites without using very expensive solutions.
"Until now, quality video hosting has been expensive, confusing, and extremely difficult for a small business owner to understand. Small businesses have fallen between the cracks of free video services and massive enterprise video solutions," Dae Mellencamp, general manager at Vimeo, said.
"Vimeo PRO resolves the contradiction that best-of-breed video quality and hosting can also be easy and affordable," he added.
The first tier, offering 250,000 plays, should be enough for most small businesses which are not going to get too many visitors.
If they do see more activity, or need more storage for videos, they can purchase more storage space in 50 GB increments for an additional $199 per year.
The same goes for usage, 100,000 additional views can be purchased for $199.
Vimeo boasts several technical details which it believes make Vimeo Pro an attractive solution. Users can upload files as large as 5 GB, which should be enough even for HD video, as long as they're not that long, and get access to all of Vimeo's technologies.
They can use the HTML5 player to make sure the videos work on any device and they can customize the player to great lengths. Vimeo says that the videos will work on tablets, mobile phones and even internet-enabled TVs.
Companies also get detailed statistics, to see which videos are the most popular, and broad privacy settings to ensure that the videos are accessible only for those that they intended to.