I know there's more going on behind the scenes with Vidyard, however I hate that the Vidyard player gets credit for being "beautifully done" when Vimeo's top notch designers did all the work.
Plus the look is not what they are selling, Vidyard's value is in their analytics and thats why they are topping the news pipeline and thats why I doubt they (or their customers) care about being so close to Vimeo.
But I do have to question what the article's author meant by 'beautiful'. Maybe that Vidyard's videos (and hence their player) supports way higher resolution than any of these other free sites. That makes sense to me, look at their sample video - its one of the best demo videos I've ever seen.
That's a fair argument - we built the player to match a popular style that our customers were requesting.
We've also built 9 other player's from scratch. There's not much you can tweak and re-design - we've done our best to hit the product market fit for what our customers and their viewers want.
I don't see the problem with copying this kind of thing - it's better for users if the flash experience is consistent, and how can you possibly improve on the Vimeo player? Is it better if they make a worse one for the sake of being different?
I see that Vidyard has also increased their pricing.
Three months back, Vidyard was offering unlimited videos on their Venti plan (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913255). Today, they're only offering 100 videos and the price has gone up from $50/mo to $249/mo. If this is a tool mostly to be used for short videos, it seems a tad on the expensive side now. If one assumes a file size of 100MB and 100 videos, that's only 10GB costing a couple dollars in storage each month. Even the 101GB of transfer is only around $15.
I understand how it would be difficult to offer unlimited video hosting (as I brought up three months ago). As a curiosity (if someone from the team is here), what changed?
Assuming the same 100MB file size, that means that Vimeo Pro is offering about 2TB of transfer per month and 50GB of storage (enough for 500 videos) for under $20/mo. In case you're wondering about the math: Vimeo offers 250,000 plays per year which comes out to over 20,000 per month and with 100MB per play you get 2TB in transfer per month. Are you finding that the average video is larger than 100MB? Of course, if the file size is larger, the extra bandwidth used would mean Vidyard would be offering fewer viewings of it. If the video is 500MB, the 101GB of transfer Vidyard offers would only allow 202 people to watch it in that month while Vimeo Pro would allow 20,000 people to watch without overage charges - plus, even at the 500MB file size, the 50GB of storage would still offer space for 100 videos like Vidyard.
If I sound critical, I'm sorry. If Vidyard isn't about storing and serving videos as much as it is about real-time analytics and integration with services like YouTube, that's just what I need to hear. I'm genuinely curious.
It's great perspective. To be completely honest - 101GB is loose. Since we leverage RTMP streaming and most viewers don't watch the entire video, we end up serving less bandwidth.
We're pretty focused on avoiding commoditization by bandwidth. As you mentioned, we're about integrations, analytics and call to action - significant value adds that vanilla hosting platforms don't and won't provide.
I'm always a little surprised when these articles don't mention wistia.com as a Vidyard predecessor and competitor. I guess Chris was right when he said it's really hard to get people to notice you[1]!
http://cl.ly/3J1x213B1z1K3t1M3T2Q
I know there's more going on behind the scenes with Vidyard, however I hate that the Vidyard player gets credit for being "beautifully done" when Vimeo's top notch designers did all the work.