Roku Developer Program

[rremde]

"dyanmicj9" wrote:
@StevenEsq2[/url:x6e0j2ly][/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?

Vimeo doesn't quote a bandwidth number.  Their bandwidth is free as long as you play within their player, but if you're streaming on Roku, you're not using their player.
They don't publish hard and fast numbers for bandwidth, but it's not part of their business plan to be a CDN for outside (Roku) services.
The numbers they quote is for storage, not bandwidth.
There is no bandwidth report - they just tell you the number of plays.
As I said, they don't WANT to be a CDN. Their sales pitch tells the whole story - they want to cost effectively stream high quality content for creators from their system. If that's not what you're doing, you're bending their rules, and if you're playing a lot of video, they need to adjust your account so you don't lose them money. 
When we spoke a couple of years ago, they didn't own their own CDN infrastructure - they were purchasing it from another vendor (which is common practice). At the time, they were paying more than I could obtain, so it didn't make sense to do business with them.  
The benefit of using Vimeo is to test your system, get your business/channel up and running - but knowing that you'll need to move your content elsewhere if you're successful.

[dyanmicj9]

"rremde" wrote:

"dyanmicj9" wrote:
@StevenEsq2[/url:2es0yzfg][/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?

Vimeo doesn't quote a bandwidth number.  Their bandwidth is free as long as you play within their player, but if you're streaming on Roku, you're not using their player.
They don't publish hard and fast numbers for bandwidth, but it's not part of their business plan to be a CDN for outside (Roku) services.
The numbers they quote is for storage, not bandwidth.
There is no bandwidth report - they just tell you the number of plays.
As I said, they don't WANT to be a CDN. Their sales pitch tells the whole story - they want to cost effectively stream high quality content for creators from their system. If that's not what you're doing, you're bending their rules, and if you're playing a lot of video, they need to adjust your account so you don't lose them money. 
When we spoke a couple of years ago, they didn't own their own CDN infrastructure - they were purchasing it from another vendor (which is common practice). At the time, they were paying more than I could obtain, so it didn't make sense to do business with them.  
The benefit of using Vimeo is to test your system, get your business/channel up and running - but knowing that you'll need to move your content elsewhere if you're successful.

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?

[rremde]

"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.

[luiznick]

"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

[dyanmicj9]

"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.

Oh men. Thanks for this. I'm a Front-end dev. I'm familiar with the terms but I haven't touched them at all. Now the boss expects me to make magic hahaha XD
He wants his own server. I was like ??? we might need to add some more experts in the team. XD
Wow From 400TB to 168 TB. Wow! That's a lot of value there.
CDN who will do HLS streaming conversion, Inxy.com, and use UCDN as our CDN,  transcode to HLS on the fly.
That's a lot to absorb. I'll have to do a lot of studying thanks for pointing me to the right direction.

[rremde]

"luiznick" wrote:

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

Looks like a bot or VPN use. IIRC, Amazon has a data center in Ashland as well.  
Here's a link that will give you a little more info:
https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-Analytics-Tracking-Goals/Spike-in-activity-from-Ash...

[cocotower]

"rremde" wrote:
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.

If your content was ad-supported then why were you having to pay them anything?  It seems that Vimeo would just run more ads when your bandwidth increased, to recover their costs.  If you're paying them but then receiving small monetary payments from the ads just to give it back to Vimeo, this seems stupid to me.

[rremde]

"cocotower" wrote:
If your content was ad-supported then why were you having to pay them anything?  It seems that Vimeo would just run more ads when your bandwidth increased, to recover their costs.  If you're paying them but then receiving small monetary payments from the ads just to give it back to Vimeo, this seems stupid to me.

Because Vimeo was just functioning as our CDN  - hosting and streaming the video.  They didn't receive any of the ad revenue we received.

[vopproduction]

Yes. 90% of my views are from Ashburn, but very, very few of those result in actual watch-time per Vimeo's stats. Apparently, Vimeo is counting 100% bandwidth for each of those views, even if there is little or no watch time.

I've scaled back my file size hoping that'll reduce bandwidth usage. Apparently, I'm in the top 1% bandwidth usage at 2.5-2.9TB/month, and they're forcing me to cut back or upgrade to a higher bandwidth plan ($4K/month for 35TB/year)

[vopproduction]

---

@rremde wrote:

"luiznick" wrote:

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

Looks like a bot or VPN use. IIRC, Amazon has a data center in Ashland as well.  
Here's a link that will give you a little more info:
https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Google-Analytics-Tracking-Goals/Spike-in-activity-from-Ash...

---

Yes. 90% of my views are from Ashburn, but very, very few of those result in actual watch-time per Vimeo's stats. Apparently, Vimeo is counting 100% bandwidth for each of those views, even if there is little or no watch time.

I'm using a third party to create my Direct Publisher RSS feed from my Vimeo account. 

I've scaled back my file size hoping that'll reduce bandwidth usage. Apparently, I'm in the top 1% bandwidth usage at 2.5-2.9TB/month, and they're forcing me to cut back or upgrade to a higher bandwidth plan ($4K/month for 35TB/year)