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by judge2020 1551 days ago
Well, that's what they sell. Vimeo charges reasonably for transcoding and storing all these different versions of videos. YouTube does it for free to stifle competition and stay the only place advertisers can go if they want a captive audience (with TikTok and Facebook, both also free, being their only real competitors).

If I had to actually recommend a service it'd be Cloudflare Stream[0], which allows you to upload videos, CF transcodes them, and you get a link to a page with just the video player[1], and they offer options like only allowing embeds on certain origins and disabling/enabling MP4 downloads. The pricing is fairly reasonable as well at $1 per 1,000 watch minutes and $5 per 1,000 minutes of stored video.

0: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

1: https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd...