E&E - The Limitations Of Vimeo

Having attended yesterdays E&E lecture on freelancing I was drawn in by a couple of poignant points. One of the presenters detailed how many freelancers were beginning to post their showreels online and how employers now simply expected a link to content.

This struck a chord because although we are not yet focussing our attention on the freelance industry, the fact remains that many students will want to be moving their content onto a online platform for their job search. As a result our target market is starting to appear a lot more tangible. 

Many people are using Vimeo for their hosting, and the many reasons for using this service over YouTube can be found in a quick search of the web, the main points are that:

• Personal video usage - no inane comments
• High Quality video by default
• Adaptable video players
• Only recommendations to view your other videos at the end of a clip, rather than a selection of related videos from other users

Although these may appear as mundane reasons for the time being, the fact remains that many professionals are maiming Vimeo their platform of choice. The question that now is needs to be asked now is how are we going to incorporate this into our business. 

There is no way that we could set out to compete with any of these well established market players, and one of my pet hates is having very little interoperability between platforms (not being able to repost a blog on blogger/twitter for example). So we must be willing to help users embed their videos into their webpages or even look into developing a temporary video holding and hosting service for when they cannot upload to Vimeo but need to quickly make a showreel available (Basic package users are only allow 1 HD upload a week, on top of this they are only allowed 500MB of storage space a week).

What I'm getting at is, as resellers we need to have a basic awareness of the constraints and needs of our clients and be ready to adapt to and incorporate their problems into our core business and technical models. In the instance of video showreels this means knowing how to quickly embed and upload content on Vimeo, or maybe even have a premium account for the company ($59.95 a year) that we can then move the customers videos into while they either create their own account or merely as a one off solution. 

The added details on the added functionality of using VimeoPlus can be found here.