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.