Rather irritating, to say the least. I understood the basics of our strife with Vimeo - I had no idea it was of this nature, nor magnitude.
While I'm not here to pledge a boycott against Vimeo or blip.tv, I also am not a user of either of these "services". As such, in light of this story, I have no further interest in them. While YouTube does indeed have a rather immature audience, at least it seems lax on what you can post.
Prime, I'm sorry you had to go through all this bullcrap. UPSLynx gave me a nice run-down of his thoughts of larger groups like IGN and GameSpot and what it's like to be small. It's a shame that these groups receive special handouts and exceptions made for them... but it makes me all the more proud to be an up and coming member of this group.
Hmm... I wonder if this article will move any waves on the blogosphere?
There should be full disclosure on all services offered. If Vimeo has a special option, everyone should be privy to it. If not, it is nothing short of exclusionary and a corrupt business model.
I've seen one of your episodes and it's about as episodic as you could get. Funny, engaging, opinionated... it's a shame you're getting lumped in with the 10 year olds posting videos of themselves playing GH or conquering Halo.
"Here's your money" is not a proper response to "please help us or refund us." Bad CS.
Viddler is hella expensive for what we want to do. Viddler would be $100 a month + $150 startup fee. If it comes to that, I'd rather dump less than that into our hosting platform and host it up ourselves.
And Rob; welcome to Icrontic: I know you're the founder of Viddler and that's cool, but engaging me in a way more constructive than "try Viddler" would have been nice. I like Viddler, it's been recommended to me many times, and everybody seems to have nothing but good things to say about it, but the way I read your TOS is that we would need to have a business account. Am I wrong on that?
If I can host video game trailers, and all the other content we make, for free, then count me in. I'd love it if you guys were the solution.
Thanks for the welcome. I was trying to fly under the radar with that one. Have you checked out our partner program? We work with many gaming properties (destructoid, joystiq, PSU.com, etc) with revenue share/partner program. We also have age-gate options with this program that let you abide by the game industries standards for trailers.
If that's of interest send me an email and I'll help get you started.
And two, if you are the size of Kotaku, you can break the rules, it’s fine. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
This is a fact made VERY evident at E3 from the big guys. It's amazing what money can bring you.
I hate hating Vimeo. They've been such a great service for my personal account, hosting my demo reel and animation tests. Their video quality is excellent, and I like their site's design and handling of uploads.
So sorry you haven't heard back from blip yet. Consider this our response
We spent a good 15 minutes discussing your blog post yesterday.
So here's the short answer: Kotaku is grandfathered in. We know that a lot of their content violate our terms, but they've been using us forever and we don't feel right shutting them down at this point when they've come to rely on us on a daily basis.
We spent some time discussing whether or not we should continue grandfathering Kotaku, and we decided that we should. But I know -- we know -- that it causes confusion and seems unfair.
Give me a call if you'd like to discuss more. I'd be happy to discuss further, and recommend some strategies for getting your videos online the way you want them.
Thanks for posting, Mike; one good thing that's come of all of this is the direct frankness and engagement of your respective companies with our community, and that's really the ultimate problem I had with Vimeo: instead of discussing the problem, they just shut us down.
I appreciate your explanation of Kotaku's use of your service, and even moreso, I appreciate your forthrightness. You're right; it did cause confusion, and it does seem unfair, but your explanation makes sense, and I know as well as anybody that things aren't always black and white.
If anything, this whole episode proves one thing: the companies that will succeed in the world of internet business are the ones that realize their customers have direct lines of communication with them and with each other; all we want is to be able to talk to you. Clearly Viddler and Blip.tv "get it".
PS: I removed your cell phone number from the post, I hope you don't mind; Uncle Google is all over these things and I don't want you to get spammed like mad
I would like to say that I'm also very impressed with the way Blip.TV and Viddler have handled the situation. My respect for these two companies has grown tremendously.
To bump this thread, and continue to highlight the ridiculousness of Vimeo:
We're about to publish a story about a documentary called "Tilt"; which is a Pinball movie. The trailer for it happens to be available on Vimeo. When we went to embed the video (which we did not make, and which does not violate the ToS), we get a message that embedded content cannot be played on this site.
That means we can never embed ANY Vimeo content on Icrontic. They have blocked us entirely.
I hope this gets much bigger, because I'm very curious to see how their PR dept handles this from a crisis comm standpoint. This is complete and utter bullshit.
Notice that both Rob Sandie (founder of Viddler) and Mike Hudack (CEO of Blip.tv) have commented on this story. Where is Vimeo? Where is there PR team? No comment from them.
I've totally got to jump in here and give a hearty /cheer for Viddler. They do all our videos for Massively.com (Joystiq's sister site), and we've had nothing but excellent, trouble-free service since we migrated off Vimeo for the exact same reason you are leaving now.
That piece on Tilt is very interesting, we've lost content because of the complete ignorance of Vimeo.
I've kept a personal account on Vimeo for my demo reel and other non-Icrontic video work. I'm going to be pulling all of my content from Vimeo and migrating fully to viddler now as a result. This is pathetic.
Viddler has been great for us. I've worked a lot with the site, as I post video weekly, and the experience has been outstanding.
we do movies and documentary (so not "ripped" or "found" from the web).
We don't use vimeo fo commercial use but just to promote our work (forwarding to video links).
Our video concerning hard life of poor people in italian suburbian.
They removed ALL my videos (either my personal ) but the worse is WITHOUT ANY WARNING.
they ask me ,if they are wrong , to anser in "civil manner" but I don't think they understand what "civil manner" consist.
desmond
That's pretty much what you get for going with 3rd party video hosting solutions.
When I was testing them out, back in '06 or '07, I uploaded four videos that I shot myself of a parade. I can't remember which service I uploaded it to, but they're defunct now.
Two of my videos were accepted and posted to my account. Two of my videos were rejected because of copyright infringement because the floats in the parade were playing music. :/
I immediately knew I couldn't use that company going forward, because I wasn't willing to GUESS which of my videos would be accepted or rejected because some peon concluded that videotaping something in the street in the open air constituted copyright infringement on music.
Your best bet is to host important videos yourself, on your own servers, using your own bandwidth, because each hosting service has different ToS and a lot of them are outlawing videogaming videos at this point.
Would you want a forum member named icrontic-sucks? Of course you're banned, and honestly, who doesn't think AMD has the greatest GPUs on the market....
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
Comments
While I'm not here to pledge a boycott against Vimeo or blip.tv, I also am not a user of either of these "services". As such, in light of this story, I have no further interest in them. While YouTube does indeed have a rather immature audience, at least it seems lax on what you can post.
Prime, I'm sorry you had to go through all this bullcrap. UPSLynx gave me a nice run-down of his thoughts of larger groups like IGN and GameSpot and what it's like to be small. It's a shame that these groups receive special handouts and exceptions made for them... but it makes me all the more proud to be an up and coming member of this group.
Hmm... I wonder if this article will move any waves on the blogosphere?
"Here's your money" is not a proper response to "please help us or refund us." Bad CS.
If I can host video game trailers, and all the other content we make, for free, then count me in. I'd love it if you guys were the solution.
If that's of interest send me an email and I'll help get you started.
This is a fact made VERY evident at E3 from the big guys. It's amazing what money can bring you.
I hate hating Vimeo. They've been such a great service for my personal account, hosting my demo reel and animation tests. Their video quality is excellent, and I like their site's design and handling of uploads.
Meh, we need an alternative service badly.
So sorry you haven't heard back from blip yet. Consider this our response
We spent a good 15 minutes discussing your blog post yesterday.
So here's the short answer: Kotaku is grandfathered in. We know that a lot of their content violate our terms, but they've been using us forever and we don't feel right shutting them down at this point when they've come to rely on us on a daily basis.
We spent some time discussing whether or not we should continue grandfathering Kotaku, and we decided that we should. But I know -- we know -- that it causes confusion and seems unfair.
Give me a call if you'd like to discuss more. I'd be happy to discuss further, and recommend some strategies for getting your videos online the way you want them.
Yours,
Mike Hudack
Co-founder & CEO, blip.tv
I appreciate your explanation of Kotaku's use of your service, and even moreso, I appreciate your forthrightness. You're right; it did cause confusion, and it does seem unfair, but your explanation makes sense, and I know as well as anybody that things aren't always black and white.
If anything, this whole episode proves one thing: the companies that will succeed in the world of internet business are the ones that realize their customers have direct lines of communication with them and with each other; all we want is to be able to talk to you. Clearly Viddler and Blip.tv "get it".
PS: I removed your cell phone number from the post, I hope you don't mind; Uncle Google is all over these things and I don't want you to get spammed like mad
We're about to publish a story about a documentary called "Tilt"; which is a Pinball movie. The trailer for it happens to be available on Vimeo. When we went to embed the video (which we did not make, and which does not violate the ToS), we get a message that embedded content cannot be played on this site.
That means we can never embed ANY Vimeo content on Icrontic. They have blocked us entirely.
How completely unprofessional. Thanks, Vimeo.
That piece on Tilt is very interesting, we've lost content because of the complete ignorance of Vimeo.
I've kept a personal account on Vimeo for my demo reel and other non-Icrontic video work. I'm going to be pulling all of my content from Vimeo and migrating fully to viddler now as a result. This is pathetic.
Viddler has been great for us. I've worked a lot with the site, as I post video weekly, and the experience has been outstanding.
we do movies and documentary (so not "ripped" or "found" from the web).
We don't use vimeo fo commercial use but just to promote our work (forwarding to video links).
Our video concerning hard life of poor people in italian suburbian.
They removed ALL my videos (either my personal ) but the worse is WITHOUT ANY WARNING.
they ask me ,if they are wrong , to anser in "civil manner" but I don't think they understand what "civil manner" consist.
desmond
When I was testing them out, back in '06 or '07, I uploaded four videos that I shot myself of a parade. I can't remember which service I uploaded it to, but they're defunct now.
Two of my videos were accepted and posted to my account. Two of my videos were rejected because of copyright infringement because the floats in the parade were playing music. :/
I immediately knew I couldn't use that company going forward, because I wasn't willing to GUESS which of my videos would be accepted or rejected because some peon concluded that videotaping something in the street in the open air constituted copyright infringement on music.
Your best bet is to host important videos yourself, on your own servers, using your own bandwidth, because each hosting service has different ToS and a lot of them are outlawing videogaming videos at this point.
Try GameTrailers.
I have a distinct feeling we are banned because we are highlighting our terrible experience with them....
ftfy
double fix't