Staff Blog

Over the last few years, we've seen a remarkable increase in non-professional video cameras. Be it using webcams, cell phones, or digital cameras, people are making creative films using all sorts of alternative means. And with popular video sharing sites such as Vimeo, sharing these creative new films has never been easier.



The Disposable Film Festival celebrates films created with these non-professional devices, and Vimeo is proud to be a leading sponsor for this festival.

We encourage you to submit any disposable films you have created to the Disposable Film Festival Site.

Once you submit your film, please tag it with 'DFF' so they can add it to the Disposable Film Festival Channel on Vimeo.

The deadline is August 31st, so go make a film or submit any you have already made. Remember, it only takes a cell phone or digital camera and little bit of creativity!

The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.

There are many reasons for the decision, two of which we would like to elaborate on.

1) Vimeo was created with the intent of inspiring creativity and providing a place to share video with friends and family. The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute "creative expression" [Note: Some users in the comments have effectively defended their work as creative. We apologize to those offended. Our decision remains for the other reasons]. Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these.

2) Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo. Over these last few months they have been the single biggest reasons for our transcoder wait times.

This decision was not easy, and there was much debate internally; however, we feel this decision will benefit Vimeo in the long run and better benefit the video makers it was created for. Our resources are limited and they must be channeled towards maintaining our goals.

Two questions you might have:

1) Are my gaming videos going to be deleted?

Starting today, all new gaming videos are subject to deletion. Videos uploaded before today will be hosted until September 1.

2) I make Machinima films! It's not the same thing! Am I banned?

We currently do not feel that Machinima films fall under the category of gaming videos described above and, therefore, assuming compliance with our site�s general terms & conditions, we will continue to accept such videos on Vimeo. We are not, at this time, banning films that fall into the Machinima genre.

As some of you may have noticed, we had some down time for a while today. One of our providers, Amazon S3, had an outage which was affecting a large portion of our content. Videos from the last few days weren't playing, and images weren't showing up most of the time.

In order to minimize the problem we disabled uploads for a while. As of now, everything is back up and running smoothly and we are closely monitoring the situation.

This is a very rare event, and most of the time would not affect Vimeo so adversely, but we're currently migrating content between providers so much of it was only available at Amazon.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused anyone, and we thank everyone for your patience. In order to appease the angry video Gods, we have ritually sacrificed a few of our finest goats. We are told by our sages that this should do the trick. So lets keep our fingers crossed.

I've been working on bringing our API up-to-date over the past couple weeks and I'm happy to announce that the Simple API now has albums, groups, and channels! As an added bonus, you can also get information on activity that happens on Vimeo.

In addition to the new methods in the Simple API, we've added support for oEmbed. oEmbed is an easy way for you to get the embed code for a video, just from it's URL.

The API Documentation has also been cleaned up to make it more consistent, easier to read, and easier to navigate. Check it out at: http://www.vimeo.com/api.

Watch out in the coming weeks for updates to the Advanced API and more example code.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful Fourth of July weekend! (and for those of you abroad, just a nice weekend in general)

In honor of our nation's independence day, I propose a weekend project in which you show what democracy means to you. Talk about it, represent it visually, make an interpretive dance about it, whatever you want.

Things you must include in the video:
-your voice
-your nation's flag
-a camera

As always, only post videos that you've made specifically for this project or it doesn't count! And don't worry if you don't get it done by the end of the weekend, just post it when its done.

add your video to the Weekend Project group.

Have fun and be creative.

Since Vimeo is all about your contacts and seeing videos that matter to you, we are always looking into ways which will help you find and become connected with people you already know on Vimeo.

Making use of the Gmail and Yahoo data API's, you can now securely authenticate yourself with either service and grant Vimeo access to your address book/contacts. From there you can see which of your Gmail or Yahoo contacts are currently on Vimeo and which of them are currently your Vimeo contact or not.

This will make it very easy for you to find your friends and family on Vimeo and quickly add them as your contact.

You can give this a try by going to the Tools menu at the top and selecting Import Contacts or go to this URL:

http://www.vimeo.com/contacts/import

We hope this helps in finding new contacts and awesome videos!

The search function on Vimeo has always been an area where we knew there could be major improvement. Well I'm glad to say that major improvement has been made. We have pretty much replaced the entire search engine, and it is now much more accurate. It also now supports search functions like + and -, so if you wanted to search for videos of the beach, but you don't want to see any volleyball, you could do: beach -volleyball. You can also search for phrases in quotes, like "best video ever". Cool, right?

You know what else is cool? Yesterday we broke 1,000,000 plays in one day on Vimeo. That's a big milestone for us! At it's peak that's 17 people hitting play every second. This time last year, we peaked at 190k plays in one day. In January this year, we were at just 220k. After a long hibernation, Vimeo has quadrupled in size in pretty much every dimension in less than six months.

Oh, we also set personal bests for videos uploaded, HD videos uploaded, videos encoded, sign ups, logged in users, comments, and likes. On any given day we usually break one of these, to smash them all at once is awesome.

It brings me great pleasure to announce the final details of Vimeo's first-ever Meetup. We've been planning this event for months, and its only days away. We are very excited to see the many friendly faces that we've begun to know and love over the years, and I can think of nothing better than a gathering of such inspired, lovely people from our community.

The event is shaping up to be a good one with interactive art and video installations by fellow Vimeo artists, Vimeo screenings, and what will sure to be an amazing audio/visual performance by video DJs the Eclectic Method.

Here are the details:

Party Time: Friday, June 27th 7:00pm-11:00pm
Doors will be open from 7:00pm-9:00pm ONLY so please come early.

The Spot: CH Studio - Williamsburg, Brooklyn - South 1st and Kent Avenue. Take the L train to the Bedford stop and it is about a 10 minute walk from there.

Why you should come: Because it will be awesome.

Important: You MUST RSVP in order to attend the event. Please do so in the Are you coming? forum in the Vimeo Meetup Group. Please post your full name and any family members that may be coming with you.

See you then!

Love,

Vimeo