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Video hosting and sharing platform Vimeo today announced the launch of an updated Apple TV app, bringing Vimeo back to the Apple TV App Store for the first time in two years.

vimeo-apple-tv.jpg

The updated Vimeo app has been rebuilt, and it is available on Apple TV units that are running tvOS 18 or higher. The Vimeo app supports discovering, searching for, and watching videos that have been uploaded to Vimeo.

It includes a Library, and Watch Later list, and a section for On Demand purchases, as well as Staff Picks. Enhanced playback with chapters, speed controls, and multi-language options, and 4K support is available.

While the Vimeo app was missing from the Apple TV App Store, Vimeo users had to AirPlay from the Vimeo app on an iPhone or an iPad to watch videos on a bigger display. Vimeo says that its community has been asking for the return of the Apple TV app for watching premium, ad-free content.

Vimeo is free to use, but it offers paid Starter, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise plans starting at $20 per month for video creators.

Article Link: Vimeo Brings Apple TV App Back
 
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Vimeo was always a much much better UI than YouTube, but at some point they pivoted into being more of a back end distribution and collaboration platform than trying to compete with Google. Probably a smart choice, but as a user I vastly prefer watching things on Vimeo than the chaos of YouTube.
 
If you're looking for a great YouTube alternative check out Rumble. They've got an AppleTV app too!
 
It blows my mind that there isn't a competitor to Youtube. Vimeo is probably 1/1000000 the size and they stand the best chance. If I was Vimeo, I'd go full early days of TikTok -- inflate views, big cash payouts to creators, and remove all ads for awhile. They just need some traction.
It's too late for them, seriously. They totally blew it and all that's left is for the right private equity buyer to come along. Bad focus, bad strategy, bad treatment of customers who cared about them cemented them in as a faded star. It's not fixable, either, because they have a constant revolving door of executives who come in and go out, usually in less than 24 months, seemingly when they realize that the situation is helpless.

The attention economy is already too tapped out by every other platform, and while the other platforms will stick around, there's not much room for a new addition on the scale of TikTok, YouTube or Instagram. Vimeo is even weirder because they're a tad bit older than YouTube, so they're not even a new addition.

They can be, at best, a SaaS app. And for a smaller team, it'd be considered a profitable and smash success. With their legacy brand as a big platform and being a publicly traded company, they just won't win.
 
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That's a good sign. The biggest loss to the platform was Minecraft I think. It would be nice if that came back one day.
 
I tried searching some videos on their website a while back, and nothing showed up. I assumed their search was broken and the platform was slowly dying.

Whatever they're doing, it's not working. This could have been a Youtube competitor. An ATV app will not turn this around.
 
I used Vimeo for a decade to host video and mainly because they allowed password protected links for client review. Last year they sent me an email saying the cost for my most basic plan quadrupled. Cancelled my account before renewal and they aggressively kept trying to charge my credit card for this non existent renewal. Each time Mastercard flagged it as suspicious and asked me to verify which I would not. Eventually, I had to change my card number because Mastercard considered these attempts as fraudulent. The only response I got from Vimeo was, we can’t stop the payment system so just let it go through and then you can request a refund. This was obviously not a satisfactory response, and their subreddit is filled with stories of this happening and then it taking forever to get the refund issued and in some cases it not happening at all. Feels like this company is dying and now trying to squeeze every penny out of their remaining customers.
 
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why use vimeo at all?
As a viewer: clean UI, no garbage, no ads. It's great.

As a creator, though? Last I checked their business model was such that if you upload a video you pay for bandwidth to distribute it. That makes it suitable for stuff like pay-per-view indie distribution (I have a friend who used it for that), or for creatives to share video for collaboration and client review purposes where YouTube wouldn't be appropriate. It's going to cost you money if more people view your video, so it makes sense only as a back-end distribution system.

I have a feeling the Apple TV app is just to make it more viable for PPV purposes and to make it easier for creatives to show off their work to clients in meeting rooms and such. Nice experience if you're on the receiving end, but someone's gotta pay them because it's not ad-based.
 
It stuns me that all the streaming platforms obviously have so much investment in their data centres etc and then forget to make apps for users on all platforms.
 
I used Vimeo for a decade to host video and mainly because they allowed password protected links for client review. Last year they sent me an email saying the cost for my most basic plan quadrupled. Cancelled my account before renewal and they aggressively kept trying to charge my credit card for this non existent renewal. Each time Mastercard flagged it as suspicious and asked me to verify which I would not. Eventually, I had to change my card number because Mastercard considered these attempts as fraudulent. The only response I got from Vimeo was, we can’t stop the payment system so just let it go through and then you can request a refund. This was obviously not a satisfactory response, and their subreddit is filled with stories of this happening and then it taking forever to get the refund issued and in some cases it not happening at all. Feels like this company is dying and now trying to squeeze every penny out of their remaining customers.

this is why to use burner virtual cards like https://www.privacy.com/

As a viewer: clean UI, no garbage, no ads. It's great.

As a creator, though? Last I checked their business model was such that if you upload a video you pay for bandwidth to distribute it. That makes it suitable for stuff like pay-per-view indie distribution (I have a friend who used it for that), or for creatives to share video for collaboration and client review purposes where YouTube wouldn't be appropriate. It's going to cost you money if more people view your video, so it makes sense only as a back-end distribution system.

I have a feeling the Apple TV app is just to make it more viable for PPV purposes and to make it easier for creatives to show off their work to clients in meeting rooms and such. Nice experience if you're on the receiving end, but someone's gotta pay them because it's not ad-based.

i hardly ever saw something on vimeo or heard of it. Must be really niche
 
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