Video sharing site Vimeo, which specializes in higher-resolution presentations than many competitors, introduced a premium service Friday for even better quality and usage rules.Vimeo, which had limited users to uploads of only 500 megabytes per week, ups the ante to 2 gigabytes weekly, and higher resolution quality, for $59.95 yearly.
Additionally, the Vimeo player, when embedded on blogs and websites, can now be customized without ads, or Vimeo promotion.
“We expect this to be really popular with power bloggers,” says Tim Allen, the general manager of Vimeo.
Vimeo, owned by Barry Diller’s IAC Corp. (also home to Ask.com and Ticketmaster) competes with blip.tv and Crackle.com as sites for video enthusiasts and filmmakers looking for an alternative to YouTube, which presents videos in low resolution, with clips that can’t run longer than 10 minutes.
To say Vimeo is dwarfed by YouTube is an understatement. YouTube attracted 92 million visitors in July, according to measurement service comScore Media Metrix.
Allen says Vimeo has grown dramatically this year, from nearly 2 million monthly visitors in January to 8 million in August, and he’s happy with his smaller, dedicated band of video enthusiasts.
In fact, he doesn’t see YouTube as the competition. Instead, it's Yahoo’s photographer enthusiast site Flickr. “There’s a lot of really creative work there.”
By Jefferson GrahamPhoto: Vimeo
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