Vimeo

Infobox Dotcom company
company_name = Vimeo
company_slogan =
owner = Connected Ventures, LLC.
company_
company_type = Subsidiary of Connected Ventures
foundation = November, 2004
location_city = New York City
location_country = U.S.
key_people = Jakob Lodwick, Founder


caption = Screenshot of vimeo.com home page
url = [http://www.vimeo.com/ vimeo.com]
registration = Optional
(required to upload)
launch_date = 2004
current_status = active
language = English
website_type = video sharing

Vimeo is a video-centric social network site (owned by Connected Ventures) which launched in November 2004. The site supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content. Registered users may also create a profile and upload small user pictures as their avatars.

Vimeo allows only user-created videos, of a "friends and family" nature. Pornography, commercial videos, gaming videoscite web|url=http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140|title=Uploading rules] or anything not created by the user is not allowed on the site. [cite web|url=http://vimeo.com/guidelines | title = Community guidelines | work = Vimeo | accessdate = 2008-09-08] Vimeo has gained a reputation [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/vimeo_hd.php] as catering to a high end, artistic crowd because of its higher bitrate, resolution, and relative HD support.

Origin of name

The name "Vimeo" was created by co-founder Jakob Lodwick. It is an anagram of "movie" and is also a play on the word "video," inserting the word "me" as a reference to the site's dedication to user-made films exclusively.

Popularity

Vimeo has seen large growth after the shutdown of Stage6, a portal which also allowed videos to be shared in HD quality.cite web|url=http://www.vimeo.com/blog:105|title=Vimeo announces increase in traffic after Stage6 shutdown.] As of September 2008, Vimeo has over 1,000,000 videos [http://vimeo.com/blog:152 One million videos] ] and 650,000 members, with an average of about 6,000 new videos uploaded daily. [http://www.vimeo.com/about About page] ]

Notable content

Vimeo has helped to offload traffic from Improv Everywhere's servers after new pranks are announced, and continues to host most of their videos [http://www.vimeo.com/ImprovEverywhere] . It was also the original location of Noah Kalina's "everyday" video [http://www.vimeo.com/99392] , which has become one of the most watched viral videos of all time. Comedians Kristen Schaal and Reggie Watts use Vimeo to promote their content. Popular internet series Jake and Amir uses Vimeo as its host as well. In June and July 2008, several Muppets including Beaker, Gonzo and Sam Eagle uploaded videos to the site.

Some popular Hollywood directors and their pet projects, and artistic amateur videographers (mostly from the vibrant Canon HV20/HV30 community) have found home at Vimeo because of its HD service.

Video quality

On October 17, 2007, Vimeo announced support for High Definition playback, becoming the first video sharing site to support consumer HD. Uploaded HD videos are automatically converted into 720/24p Flash video. Vimeo tried to upgrade the frame rate of their HD videos for up to 30 fps in March 2008, but the lack of Adobe Flash's full graphical acceleration in some platforms meant bad performance to many users' PCs, which led back to the old maximum of 24 fps formula a month later. Non-HD videos do re-encode at a maximum of 30fps and they also have significantly higher bitrates than other competing video sharing sites. Users can upload up to 500 MB of videos per week.

Vimeo uses a variant of FFmpeg to read the uploaded videos and feed them to their encoder. FFmpeg gives Vimeo the ability to support most kinds of videos (including HDV), except some intermediate-grade codecs and the popular AVCHD.

Gaming videos deletion

On July 21, 2008, Vimeo announced that they were no longer going to allow gaming videos due to the fact that:

"Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo. Over these last few months they have been the single biggest reasons for our transcoder wait times."
--Blake Whitman, Community Director

This announcement has had reaction, the majority of gamers uploading videos to Vimeo oppose the change while supporters for the site have expressed acceptance for the well-being of the future of the site.

Pre-existing gaming videos were deleted on September 1st, 2008. All new uploads are currently subject to this rule.

References

See also

* Comparison of video services
* CollegeHumor
* Jake and Amir

External links

* [http://www.vimeo.com/ Vimeo]
* [http://www.connectedventures.com/ Connected Ventures]
* [http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136116-page,1/article.html PC World review of the site] August 2007