Offers 50GB of HD Video with Business Features for $199 a Year

In another move aimed at harnessing the predicted surge in video use online, Vimeo today is launching a $199-per-year Vimeo PRO video hosting service for small businesses. The company says it created its service to give any business the chance to host an affordable and branded “Portfolio” site featuring 50GB of HD-quality video supporting HTML5 and full tablet, mobile and connected TV devices. But new features like a customizable player and privacy-protected client review pages will appeal to the smaller production and post boutiques already using Vimeo Plus.
“This was the missing link for us and something our users have wanted for some time,” said filmmaker Blake Whitman, Vimeo’s Director of Community and Product, during an interview last week. “We’ve been focused for a long time on individual creators of video but those same people have also wanted a commercial option. We’ve tested it with a lot of different types of businesses – some that are retail-based, some very video-intensive – and we’ll be coming out soon with launch partners that give users a variety of ideas of how PRO can be used.”

The new service lets users upload 5GB files at a time, up to the 50GB limit, and supports up to 250,000 viewer plays. If you’ve got more complex and larger video files to host, and have a wider audience, you can purchase extra storage and playback. Each additional 50GB is $199, as is each increment of 100,000 plays. “This is a pretty amazing value when you compare it to existing enterprise hosting packages out there right now costing thousands of dollars a year,” said Whitman. “And if you’re a really small-scale production company, you don’t even have to create a Web site. Your Portfolio site can be your main Web site.”


Various templates let users create portfolios outside the regular Vimeo community featuring embedded video and links to social media.

Whitman said existing users had long been requesting anonymous and private client review pages that sit outside the very public Vimeo community, something the company initially addressed with its first paid service, Vimeo Plus. “Some production companies have already been tapping into the unbranded video review page options in Vimeo Plus by making their videos private and sharing them with clients via a password,” said Whitman. “With Vimeo PRO, however, you don’t have to be logged into Vimeo to leave a comment, and you can do it privately. These review pages feel and look the way that you want them to, without any of the Vimeo branding or metadata, and your video and client comments take center stage.”

Production companies have likewise gravitated to the streamlined video player without the Vimeo logo first offered to Vimeo Plus subscribers. The new PRO option takes this one step further and lets users add their own company logo. “You can add a logo that will remain visible throughout your entire video, one that fades after just a few seconds or one that appears only as the video loads,” said Whitman. (Though the blue italic “HD,” which remains on the PRO players, is a Vimeo brand in its own right.)

As video becomes the Web’s default communicator, analytics and social media have become required tools for managing and marketing content to ever wider audiences. Vimeo PRO lets users embed links to Facebook, Twitter and custom URLs but also track how the video is being watched and shared.

Whitman said today’s launch, which the company has been working on for the past year, is just stage one of Vimeo PRO’s rollout. “The fact that until now people couldn’t use Vimeo for commercial purposes really limited the amount of folks who could sign up. So this is very liberating for those who need video hosting for their production company or blog or whatever small business they happen to be in.”

Now that Vimeo has gone commercial, what will happen to Vimeo.com, built expressly for individuals to share their work with the purest of artistic intentions? Whitman said the new service will happily coexist with the entire Vimeo community and there’s no reason to worry that one-way marketing messages will begin diluting Vimeo’s original mission. New PRO subscribers will be able to opt in to the wider Vimeo exchange with a “Community Pass” but “all Vimeo PRO users who opt back in must still abide by our existing community guidelines,” he said.

Vimeo PRO will go live at vimeo.com today, August 1, at 1:00 pm Eastern Time.