What is Vimeo?

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Vimeo offers video hosting including a customizable, easy to embed, ad free video player along with privacy controls. All paid plans include unlimited bandwidth in the Vimeo player.

Overview

Who Vimeo is For:

Vimeo is for course creators who need video hosting for their course videos. Videos take up a lot of space so you’ll place a heavy load on your web hosting account if you upload your videos there. In addition, regular web hosting is not optimized to stream videos. Therefore it’s best (and usually less expensive) to host your video files with a well optimized video hosting provider.

Skill Level:

It’s easy to upload and manage your videos from within your Vimeo dashboard. With Vimeo, you can use their video player so you don’t need to mess with finding a video player solution. They allow you to customize the player without knowing any code. When you have the video and the player customized, simply embed your videos by copying and pasting a line of code and you’re set.

Deployment:

You’ll login to your Vimeo account online. Advanced plans allow collaboration with other team members as well as review and approval tools to help streamline the process across a team.

Special Features:

Vimeo paid plans start at prices low enough that you’re not going to be able to beat them with regular web hosting. The Vimeo player is designed to be responsive so your videos will look great on any device. You can also embed permissions in your videos which means you can specify exactly which websites are allowed to embed your video. This is crucial for online course creators as you don’t want just anyone taking your videos and embedding them on their own site.

Disadvantages:

As a course creator, you’ll likely finish making your videos and then upload them all at once. The only problem is Vimeo charges by how much you upload per week. The lowest plan allows for 5GB/week which may not be enough space to upload all the videos within your course. So you may need to choose a higher priced plan and unfortunately, those require annual billing. So it’s a problem unless you can stretch out your video uploads to 5GB per week. If you’re using Vimeo, you may need to start uploading your course videos before the entire course is finished to save some money on your video hosting plan.

Detailed Features

VIDEO PLAYERPRIVACYMARKETING
✔ Unlimited bandwidth✔ Password protection✔ Publish to social media
✔ 4K & HDR support✔ Domain-level privacy✔ Embeddable playlists
✔ No ads✔ Private link sharing✔ Shareable video albums
✔ Player customization✔ Social distribution✔ Social stats
✔ Embed anywhere✔ Stats dashboard

Pricing Model

Starting Price: $12/month to upload 5GB/week with unlimited bandwidth and several other features.

Advanced Plans: $75/month billed annually for 7T of storage and many other features.

Annual Savings: The $12/month Vimeo Plus plan is only $7/month if paid annually. Many other plans are only billed annually.

Trial Option: There is no trial, but they do offer a free plan.

Free Version: Vimeo Basic is free.

Guarantee: There is no money back guarantee. You can cancel at any time to stop your subscription, but you may not be able to get your money back.

Customer Support

Training: Knowledge base articles and video tutorials.
Support: Email tickets.

Company Details

Founded in: 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein
Headquarters: New York, USA

Competing Tools

An alternative to Vimeo is Wistia. It’s more expensive and geared more toward marketing videos, but it can work. You can also use YouTube, but it won’t look as professional. SproutVideo is another option. Vimeo really does have the market for inexpensive video hosting locked down for now.

Lisa Parmley
Lisa Parmley

Lisa Parmley is the founder of coursemethod.com. After gaining a Master's degree, she worked in research for about seven years. She started a training company in 2001, offering a course helping people pass a professional exam. That course has earned multiple 7 figures. She created SEO and authority site building training around 2007 which went on to earn well into the 6-figure mark.

She has 22+ years of experience in the trenches creating and selling online courses. Get help starting and growing your online course business here.

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