Why breaking Vimeo’s ToS is a Bad Idea™

Short ver­sion: Don’t do it, it’s a bad idea, host it your­self if you’re seri­ous about busi­ness video online, host it on YouTube if you don’t yet have the resources to.

Vimeo is an amaz­ing ser­vice. Their high qual­ity, long for­mat video is a great choice for peo­ple pub­lish­ing cre­ative con­tent online, and the gen­eral awful­ness of com­peti­tor YouTube’s embed­ding options (and lack of any pre­mium plan) makes Vimeo’s sleek player embed look down­right amazing.

The temp­ta­tion for busi­nesses, there­fore, is to hijack it and just see what happens. More than a few peo­ple have writ­ten about Vimeo’s com­mer­cial use guide­lines over the last lit­tle few months — and the con­sen­sus is, rightly, that Vimeo is not the right tool here.

In short, yes, Vimeo have hosted com­mer­cial videos, and yes, some of those videos are explic­itly con­doned by Vimeo. How­ever, in terms of build­ing traf­fic, com­mu­nity, and ensur­ing con­ti­nu­ity, depend­ing on Vimeo would be really, really ill advised. It’s not what the ser­vice is designed to do, you have absolutely no recourse (as either a paid or unpaid client) to any deci­sion they may make to remove your con­tent, and there are even lin­ger­ing avail­abil­ity (net­work) issues with a num­ber of Aus­tralian ISPs.

It’s a bad idea, despite the good encode qual­ity and beau­ti­ful player skin. It’s irrel­e­vant that oth­ers have used it com­mer­cially with suc­cess — the real­ity is that unless they’ve got a com­mer­cial arrange­ment with Vimeo (Thread­less do, Sam­sung did, etc. — but once you’re pulling the kind of cam­paign traf­fic they can then Vimeo might come to an arrange­ment with you about it!) you’re at con­sid­er­able risk of hav­ing your con­tent pulled. In the scheme of things this should mat­ter lots more than just find­ing some­where else to put your con­tent. Sites like Vimeo are com­pelling because of com­mu­nity, and they’ve done a lot of work to inte­grate with Face­book, etc., that YouTube haven’t yet, or won’t because of polit­i­cal (busi­ness) hur­dles. SEO is also a con­sid­er­a­tion — you NEVER want dupli­cate con­tent, because it deval­ues it when you end up com­pet­ing with your­self. Yet when your con­tent could be pulled at any moment (all it takes is a user to flag a video for mod­er­a­tion and the whole thing comes crash­ing down), hav­ing it hosted on another web­site starts to sound com­pelling. Vimeo is an amaz­ing, com­mu­nity dri­ven plat­form that is utterly dis­in­ter­ested in pro­mot­ing com­mer­cial inter­ests that don’t have amaz­ing cre­ative — and talk­ing heads on a video don’t even for a moment fall into that box.

If you want to do video seri­ously (i.e. not on YouTube, where sim­i­lar prob­lems CAN arise RE: con­tent mod­er­a­tion but are much more rare in prac­tice), then host­ing your own on a con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work is really the only good option for busi­ness. Alter­na­tives like blip.tv exist but have aver­age skins, aver­age encode qual­ity, and worse avail­abil­ity issues than Vimeo a lot of the time. Strongly rec­om­mend: use YouTube, it’s top-tier in terms of ease of use and much lower risk than most other exter­nalised video hosts.

Down the track, host­ing your own con­tent on a CDN is prob­a­bly the best way to do mon­e­tized video. There are some com­mer­cial options, but none of them are amaz­ing, few of them are geared towards content-protected mon­e­ti­za­tion and nearly all of them are expensive.

Along­side all these issues is the ques­tion of video storage/archival. Even for non-geeks, this shouldn’t be a big deal to get right — exter­nal ter­abyte hard dri­ves cost south of $100 these days. In prac­tice, though, con­ti­nu­ity and archival of con­tent is a big deal for many users — espe­cially where con­tent is shot ‘straight to cam­era’ with lit­tle other pro­duc­tion involved (so no inci­den­tal copies are made trans­fer­ring between com­put­ers, etc.). If you’re rolling your own video and not back­ing it up, stay clear of any ser­vice that might remove your only copy of valu­able IP in the event that they realise you’re using their service.

Nev­er­the­less, for short­lived cam­paigns and clearly non-profit activ­i­ties — and no, your con­sult­ing busi­ness’ free advice doesn’t count — it’s prob­a­bly worth the risk for many organ­i­sa­tions. The lack of a clear reg­u­la­tory frame­work makes Vimeo a bad choice for busi­ness, and Vimeo know it — this is not an acci­den­tal over­sight on their part that you should hope means you can ‘get away with it’.

There’s been spec­u­la­tion that Vimeo’s par­ent com­pany, IAC, is going to either reform Vimeo’s prod­uct mix or use its tech­nol­ogy stack to develop a busi­ness offer­ing seg­mented entirely from the Vimeo com­mu­nity. How­ever, a quick look at the other web prop­er­ties owned by IAC makes it pretty clear that it’s a B2C and social media busi­ness — with con­sumer focus — through and through. My take is that if you hold your breath for a B2B video solu­tion from them you’ll sooner pass out than suc­ceed online.

# by Josh on October 19th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Business Podcasting for the little guy

Today I had an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion about busi­ness pod­cast­ing for a B2B focused small busi­ness look­ing to gen­er­ate leads and per­ceived exper­tise in their area. We chat­ted a lit­tle bit about the tools that were needed and observed that, far from being a big bur­den, pod­cast­ing is rel­a­tively low effort while giv­ing an authen­tic con­nec­tion with peo­ple who con­sider you an expert in your field.

Pod­cast­ing ful­fills much the same role an email newsletter/mass con­tact does — yet man­ages to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself in the medium to actu­ally get onto people’s desks in a bit of a unique way. Tech­ni­cally pod­cast­ing is pretty easy to imple­ment, with Word­Press being one obvi­ous tool to make it hap­pen online and most new com­put­ers sport­ing Win­dows, OS X or Linux com­ing with free soft­ware included (or at least eas­ily avail­able) to pro­duce the content.

So what’s our role? Just lift­ing the bar, really. From snazzy intro/outro music to stan­dard­ised call-to-action snip­pets that get attached or rotated week by week, a lit­tle bit of exper­tise goes a long way to cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful, easy to cre­ate pod­cast­ing expe­ri­ence. This makes it eas­ier for small busi­nesses to stay in it for the long haul, build­ing bet­ter brands, leads, and adding value for customers.

# by Josh on June 9th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Reflections on an exciting and terrifying letter

This evening I received a let­ter of nom­i­na­tion from my uni­ver­sity sup­port­ing my exchange appli­ca­tion. My heart is greatly torn at this news. God is not with­out a sense of irony! Tori and I both pray for a future serv­ing God together, but the process to attain­ing this is not, it seems, one with­out pain or dif­fi­culty. We antic­i­pate more long months apart, and I face leav­ing Syd­ney, its com­forts and securities.

In Syd­ney, there is secu­rity in so many things. I trust in fam­ily, in friends, in per­sonal and pro­fes­sional net­works, in job secu­rity and my own abil­i­ties. I trust in credit cards, Inter­net providers, news­pa­pers and mobile phones. All of these things come to noth­ing, dis­solv­ing in the face of study­ing a lan­guage so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from my own first lan­guage. Yet, were I to achieve any degree of com­fort­able­ness in this lan­guage, at least some of the things in which I falsely find secu­rity would, with­out sound rea­son, assume that posi­tion of trust in my life once more.

The one true thing to trust in is com­mon to all lan­guages, all peo­ple, and every place on earth. There’s just one sure and cer­tain hope that is unfail­ing. When every thing and per­son on earth gives way, Jesus alone is our hope and stay. (So thank­ful to God for Tori’s reminder of that in the midst of my freak­ing out about all of this tonight — you are a wise and godly woman Tori!)

Busi­ness strat­egy, inter­net devel­op­ment, and the excit­ing insan­ity of startup work in an amaz­ing indus­try with the best col­leagues will trans­form into, near-exclusively, the well-trodden path of labo­ri­ous lan­guage study, learn­ing through hum­bling fail­ure and the neces­sity of con­stant cor­rec­tion by even the clos­est of friends. Yet lan­guage learn­ing opens doors, com­mu­ni­cates truths, and, sim­i­larly to the insan­ity of star­tups, is spurred along by neces­sity and an urgent need for improvement.

For my part, I’m learn­ing to trust God more and hav­ing the false objects of my hope called out in front of me by even the sug­ges­tion of hav­ing to leave them behind. It’s funny, because I thought I’d thought about this — I guess as things become con­crete prob­lems get harder to ignore! Strangely, the things I had thought will be dif­fi­cult to let go and live with­out — a car, a great IT setup, books, pur­chas­ing power due to con­strained exchange bud­get, etc. — hadn’t even come up in my mind yet (though they may later).

Per­haps the issue for me is less mate­ri­al­ism, as I had thought, and more pride and an overde­pen­dence on the things that don’t sat­isfy and give life to the full! The absur­dity of this sit­u­a­tion is per­haps best encap­su­lated in the obser­va­tion that I am torn at the spec­tac­u­lar breadth, depth and width of oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vided. It is ridicu­lous to think that I, such a mediocre stu­dent, should be given the chance to study at a top-5 uni­ver­sity as well as the remark­ably well-regarded Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. The ridicu­lous­ness of this is, per­haps, only sur­passed by the fact that I then pro­ceed to com­plain about it!

And both these priv­i­leges are like rub­bish com­pared to the sur­pass­ing great­ness of know­ing the Lord Jesus Christ — this is the most absurd oppor­tu­nity of all. To be loved by the Cre­ator, whose cre­ation (of which I am part) destroyed Him, though death could not hold Him down, such that death promises eter­nal life through Christ’s vic­tory: it is beyond comprehension! 感谢主！

# by Josh on September 4th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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East African Internet expansion

(East) Africa just had their global Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity sig­nif­i­cantly expanded. Edu­ca­tion appli­ca­tions are presently lim­ited to the ter­tiary sec­tor. How­ever, the promise of growth in Kenya and Tan­za­nia par­tic­u­larly is sig­nif­i­cant as costs fall. Ini­tially ISPs in this region have gone for higher band­width over cost reduc­tion. That said, if Inter­net access devel­op­ments fol­low mod­els estab­lished already in China and India, con­ven­tional ISPs aren’t going to deliver growth, mobile providers will.

Accord­ingly, the improved band­width sit­u­a­tion at the present pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive costs of ~$600/month for a good link is ulti­mately a bit irrel­e­vant if mobile tech deliv­ers last-mile infra­struc­ture and the mobile web enables e-commerce, social media par­tic­i­pa­tion, gov­er­nance, health­care and more. This isn’t a case for exist­ing ISPs to drop prices: they’ve def­i­nitely got a very good busi­ness case for leav­ing prices up but using the link to improve value while this is still a valu­able com­mod­ity. The only sig­nif­i­cant short-term chal­lenge to this comes, poten­tially, in the form of any gov­ern­ment pol­icy imple­mented. They might do well to inter­vene here and stim­u­late eco­nomic devel­op­ment by pro­mot­ing global con­nec­tiv­ity… but I sus­pect the inter­ests of estab­lished busi­ness and gov­ern­ment, if they resem­ble any­thing like those in Aus­tralia, coin­cide too sig­nif­i­cantly for such bold maneu­vers to ever come to fruition!

From a busi­ness stand­point, it makes sense to cap­ture these mar­kets with medium band­width tech­nolo­gies early. That said, the rel­a­tively lim­ited capac­ity of this addi­tional global link makes co-location essen­tial for any seri­ous engage­ment. What this rep­re­sents is an impor­tant in-road for low-outlay devel­op­ment of new mar­kets with sig­nif­i­cant par­al­lels to exist­ing prod­ucts (i.e. to English-speaking pop­u­la­tions with­out need for addi­tional infrastructure).

For East Africans, how­ever, this is much big­ger. Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity enables exports of inno­v­a­tive solu­tions, and, as social media uptake improves, of localised (l10n)/internationalised (i18n) solu­tions in response to this newly-visible Inter­net mar­ket seg­ment. The prob­lem of ghet­toi­sa­tion along lan­guage lines is not so promi­nent per­haps as a result of sig­nif­i­cant Anglo­phone influ­ence — Fran­coph­one Africa will, of course, engage in dif­fer­ent net­works because of lan­guage bar­ri­ers. Yet some ser­vices, Twit­ter per­haps emi­nent among them, have irra­tionally suc­ceeded inde­pen­dently of ‘native’ lan­guage (it remains at present offered only in Eng­lish and Japan­ese, despite sig­nif­i­cant Chi­nese mem­ber­ship, and, who can for­get, Iran­ian polit­i­cal application!) — while oth­ers (Face­book, to pick a sim­i­lar exam­ple) have lan­guished and been replaced by clones despite their lin­guis­tic plu­ral­ity (26 unique lan­guages last I recall hear­ing a count, includ­ing Eng­lish (Pirate) and many more seri­ous ones) — Xiaonei being but one exam­ple of this.

If lan­guage is not an issue, it is pos­si­ble other dis­par­i­ties will become divi­sive in the same way. Devel­op­men­tal bar­ri­ers in terms of soft­ware indus­try (a key dri­ver of domes­tic web inno­va­tion) and global trad­ing part­ners will steer usage in any num­ber of par­tic­u­lar direc­tions. For exam­ple, China’s inept attempts at achiev­ing inde­pen­dence from Microsoft soft­ware in the last decade have been effec­tively squashed by their ram­pant piracy sit­u­a­tion. Parts of east­ern Africa engage in lit­eral acts of piracy, but it’s prob­a­bly not indica­tive of an atti­tude towards or devel­oped indus­try against pro­tec­tion of intel­lec­tual prop­erty. If the crim­i­nal dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work doesn’t yet exist, and soft­ware adop­tion is insuf­fi­ciently mature, it’s entirely pos­si­ble that open source could win. This is naive, and based on the pre­sump­tion that Africa has, to date, existed in a vac­uum — but if we con­sider for a moment a day work­ing on a com­puter with­out Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity, some­thing of the rad­i­cal dif­fer­ence between min­i­mal con­nec­tiv­ity and full-on broad­band enabled con­nec­tiv­ity begins to sink in.

One Aus­tralian com­men­ta­tor recently observed, in response to a dra­matic increase in aver­age per-capita band­width consumption/annum, that there are a num­ber of “tip­ping points” in Inter­net usage. For exam­ple, in the last 18 months, avail­abil­ity of online ser­vices as well as wider adop­tion of home broad­band has resulted in a mas­sive expan­sion of data trans­fers despite only a mar­ginal increase in aver­age con­nec­tion speed. Youtube and its ilk have entered a per­fect storm of grad­u­ally expand­ing con­nec­tiv­ity: it just so hap­pens that at cer­tain points, con­nec­tiv­ity results in usage peaks (which then plateau but don’t decline) as con­sumers dis­cover new ways of using the Inter­net to inter­act. This hap­pens with the tran­si­tion from dialup to always-on Inter­net, and it hap­pens again at cer­tain speed points – con­sider tabbed brows­ing as well as video on demand/what we now con­sider “band­width inten­sive” activities.

This could be a tip­ping point for eco­nomic devel­op­ment and global inte­gra­tion. Watch closely!

# by Josh on July 25th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Correcting course: change management for small biz

I’m cur­rently in the process of try­ing to roll together a few host­ing accounts of mine that have unnec­es­sar­ily been run­ning for the past few years as I’ve dis­cov­ered ‘bet­ter’ ser­vices but not both­ered rolling the old accounts over to. I’m prob­a­bly los­ing around $700 a year because of this, and basi­cally killing any rev­enue from host­ing for other clients by mak­ing the whole process so unmanageable.

It’s frus­trat­ing, because it’s self-inflicted, rel­a­tively fix­able, and a prime exam­ple of ter­ri­ble stew­ard­ship on my part. It trick­les out of my account in minor trans­ac­tions of around $20, and I just don’t miss the money as much as I should. The prob­lem is, if the trans­fer gets screwed up, var­i­ous peo­ple depen­dent par­tic­u­larly on email (less so web­sites — they can with­stand being down for a period of time, but for most clients of mine email is THE cru­cial appli­ca­tion) cease to func­tion until the DNS mends itself.

For this rea­son, I’ve not been brave (fool­ish?) enough to entrust the task to a ser­vice such as ODesk or RentA­Coder, even though either has the poten­tial to totally take the headache away for a pretty min­i­mal cost. I know that the odds of some­thing going wrong between the expo­sure of core host­ing pass­words to strangers, in a process that is the web equiv­a­lent of a heart bypass, are pretty unac­cept­ably high to sim­ply palm off to some stranger for a chunk of change. Part of the prob­lem is the kind of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity capa­bil­i­ties faced by many of my clients aren’t such that ser­vice noti­fi­ca­tions pro­vide any par­tic­u­lar ben­e­fit: it’s not as though they have any par­tic­u­lar rem­edy for ‘sched­uled main­te­nance’ in terms of noti­fy­ing clients, as, unlike larger busi­nesses, their web­sites are not fre­quently vis­ited as first point of con­tact for vast num­bers of exist­ing and prospec­tive clients of their own, and pub­lic apolo­gies or noti­fi­ca­tions are meaningless.

Sim­i­larly, the scope of client edu­ca­tion for such a minor under­tak­ing is itself quite for­mi­da­ble — this sort of out­age is highly occa­sional and the clients are so var­ied that there are no par­tic­u­lar processes in place for deal­ing with it. Micro web agen­cies aren’t gen­er­ally well equipped to do this sort of thing, sim­ply as a byprod­uct of the nature of the provider/client rela­tion­ship. In my work with larger busi­nesses (espe­cially where SaaS is a core offer­ing) where the rela­tion­ship is less provider/client and more embed­ded (i.e. I don’t end up func­tion­ing as an exter­nal party!) we have of course for­mu­lated plans for con­ti­nu­ity and noti­fi­ca­tion, but this can­not be the case as sim­ply or read­ily for smaller, more frag­mented organisations.

These issues have pro­duced some­thing of a per­fect storm, where minor recur­rent losses are the path of least resis­tance in a sit­u­a­tion that requires a fair amount of (non-financial, tan­gi­ble and intan­gi­ble) invest­ment to cor­rect course. This, com­bined with the fact that I don’t have enough clients to jus­tify writ­ing migra­tion code, and the gen­eral awful­ness (par­tic­u­larly the glacial slow­ness)of WHM/other pro­pri­etary host man­age­ment soft­ware, has meant I’ve yet to embark on an exer­cise with lit­tle vis­i­ble ben­e­fit. Over 50% of this task is stuff you can’t out­source, or at least shouldn’t: client edu­ca­tion and main­tain­ing relationships.

Small busi­ness own­ers: how do you bal­ance this need for process improve­ment and cost sav­ing with the real­ity of day-to-day busy­ness and your oblig­a­tions as a provider?

# by Josh on July 10th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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