Has Vimeo Pro ever billed you for excessive bandwidth?

"rremde" wrote:
 They are great, and not unreasonable at all.  Our use was VERY high - we're running feature films, and have a library of approximately 2000 films, and running 5 channels.  The cost per GB was reasonable (flat fee based on average use per month) - cheaper than S3 and a lot of other players out there, but more expensive than we could source elsewhere. 

I'm glad they were reasonable with you.    I just got my email this morning, and they want $1000/month.   We only served 115k views in the last 30 days (which is a fraction of when we opened, as we were getting over a million views per month).
So for us, it would be cheaper to host on S3 w/ CloudFront. 

"rremde" wrote:

"dyanmicj9" wrote:


They just gave me a price per GB bandwidth. Yep its cheaper than wistia and s3. (sliding rate card style)
Thanks for the CDN advice. I'm familiar with the term but i don't know how it really works.
So If I have a 600 hours long course and I'm selling to my members. Where should I host them? Do you have any suggestions?

A CDN is the point where viewers access the video.  They may or may not host the files.
There are a number of other factors to consider:
How technical are you?  Vimeo provides a very non-technical method to upload, store and stream your video.  They make it easy to set up playlists. Letting them do that for you can allow you to spend more time selling your course, and focusing on your business. 
How large are your files?  Vimeo charges you bandwidth for the entire file when someone starts to watch, even if they only watch a few minutes of an hour long video.  To get around that you might want to investigate a CDN who will do HLS streaming conversion for you on the fly. On Vimeo's system, we were consuming 400TB/month - after switching CDNs, we're doing similar volume but only using 168TB/month.  That's because we're only paying for the video actually watched.
We have an account with Inxy.com, and use UCDN as our CDN.  They transcode to HLS on the fly, and we're well under one cent per GB. But we have to create and maintain our own playlists/apps.

Hello,
A question, for those who use Vimeo and have some direct publisher channel, do you also have a big traffic coming from Ashburn, Virginia? this month my 458k plays, 444k came from Ashburn, Virginia.
Thank you

Well, we just got an email from Vimeo to "discuss a long term arrangement" - obviously they want to talk bandwidth charges, so I'll update here.

Will you please update us? I have been looking for an answer to this question the past 2 days, nobody could give me a clear one. I could benefit from your experience. So how did the arrangement with vimeo go?

How much traffic are you pushing?    I did 1.6 million views one month and never got so much as an email from Vimeo.   I've never heard of such a thing, and I didn't see anything in their TOS relating to overage charges.  I'm very curious as well if this is an issue.

Sorry for the delay - we just got this sorted with Vimeo.  

First of all, they have been absolute peaches to work with.  They are great, and not unreasonable at all.  Our use was VERY high - we're running feature films, and have a library of approximately 2000 films, and running 5 channels.  The cost per GB was reasonable (flat fee based on average use per month) - cheaper than S3 and a lot of other players out there, but more expensive than we could source elsewhere. Since our content is ad supported, we're pushing pennies across the table, and small differences are important, so we'll be hosting elsewhere.  We came up with a plan to transition off of Vimeo in an agreed upon timeframe to transition our traffic off of their system.  We're still going to keep the Pro membership as a backup, should our new CDN experience a server failure/outage, and Vimeo was fine with that.  I want to stress that they've been VERY reasonable to work with.  They stated on several occasions that they're not interested in shutting us off suddenly, or holding our feet to the fire - and they were good to their word.

"attilascreative" wrote:
...
One of my channels currently streams about 6TB of data per month and was considering switching to VimeoPro. Does anyone use Vimeo that transmits this much data and if so, did they charge you anything extra?
From Vimeo Pro FAQ: You’ll never encounter surprise charges for overages, so long as you’re using our gorgeous player.

Yep - you'll get an email.  But, depending on your CDN, it may be a decent deal, particularly given the convenience of the Dropbox API, and their automatic transcoding, and the ease of using their playlists. They also limit the number of API calls per hour, so using them will depend upon how much activity you have. I'd rather not post specifics publicly, as I don't know what their costs are, or what cost range they're offering users.  If you have more detailed questions, feel free to PM me.

"rremde" wrote:
Sorry for the delay - we just got this sorted with Vimeo.  

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. That helps a lot.

"rovidx_media" wrote:


I'm glad they were reasonable with you.    I just got my email this morning, and they want $1000/month.   We only served 115k views in the last 30 days (which is a fraction of when we opened, as we were getting over a million views per month).
So for us, it would be cheaper to host on S3 w/ CloudFront. 

The key is bandwidth. First, go look at the info on the films you're hosting on Vimeo, and take a look at the file sizes - if you're using their recommended bitrates, your filesizes are HUGE.  (We stream at about 10-20% of their recommended bitrate, and the results look fine).  Next, get them on the phone and talk with them, and ask how many TB you're streaming per month.  They don't have that metric available in their dashboard, but they're happy to provide that info to you if you ask.
If you don't need their CMS, or their system to generate XML for you, there are folks like Universal CDN and Highwinds that can offer much lower streaming prices.
Keep in mind that Vimeo and others like them don't own their own servers - so they're at the mercy of their CDN when it comes to price, and if they're being honest with me (and I have no reason to believe otherwise - I've worked with them since they started, and have a good relationship with many of the folks in the organization), they haven't negotiated hard enough with their CDN.

We just got our email.  They have been very decent to work with.  Our usage outside the player is over 6T per month.  S3 is about 9 cents per GB last time we checked.  Vimeo is charging less.  (PM me for the quote they gave us.)

@StevenEsq2[/url:imswd4ko][/color] How much did Vimeo quote you?

Also, Do you know the volume of the Free Bandwidth included in your plan?
And Did they tell you how much you exceeded?
Like fore example Base Plan 10TB, Exceeded 20 TB so 20TB is $1000
Can you see a bandwidth usage report?