Vimeo goes Pro

Video sharing site Vimeo is expanding its horizons by offering a Pro service tailored to the needs of small businesses.

Vimeo Pro is priced at $199 per year as a flat fee for 50GB of hosting and 250,000 plays. Most services charge by bandwidth, but Vimeo doesn't place a cap, so you won't be charged extra if your videos are long. Extra storage can be purchased in 50GB increments for $199, and extra plays in 100,000 increments, also for $199.

Vimeo creative director Jeremy Boxer explained that the Pro service fills a gap in the market: "It sits between free services, which don't provide enough control for commercial purposes, and the existing paid-for services, which cost about $350 per month and are quite labour-intensive to maintain".

A similar amount of hosting and plays on Longtail would come to around $6,060 for the year, on Vidcaster the Standard package is $1,188 annually and you'd pay about $2,148 on Wistia. These companies are offering more functionality, but for those who don't need the extra features Vimeo Pro is a good fit.

Your $199 gets you the ability to brand and customise the player as you like, and you can also create portfolio pages that display your videos in multiple collections. You could build a front page for your site and the portfolio pages containing different collections of videos would appear as tabs.

For companies that need to work collaboratively on videos or show work to a client before it goes live, there are video review pages. These enable you to put video online on a private page for someone else to view and comment upon.

The analytics provided with Pro are the same as those that come with the Vimeo Plus account: they enable you to track where your videos have been embedded, how many plays, loads and finishes there were, and it's all broken down by geographical location.

The content on Vimeo Pro is kept out of the Vimeo community, but it's possible to get it in there if it's suitable using the Vimeo Community Pass. Boxer told us: "If you've created a video that's an artistic work in its own right, you can enter it into the Vimeo community and it will have its chance to go viral. So long as you've followed all of the guidelines, if it does go viral you won't be charged for those plays."