Hi Everyone,
Yes, it’s true that Vimeo has decided against allowing the Premium plan for this kind of uses case. Here are the two relevant emails I received.
Hi David,
I’m a Presales Specialist here at Vimeo—thank you for following up about this!
To clarify, [the previous rep] was specifically referring to the fact that Vimeo does not offer tools to sell live event access, which is why she had pointed you in the direction of Vimeo OTT, which does.
However, it sounds like you have this taken care of outside of Vimeo and are more so concerned with whether or not this is allowed. I’m happy to report that you are more than welcome to sell content by your own means, but this does tie into our bandwidth usage policy.
While we’re happy to provide users with unlimited bandwidth for standard use of our embeddable video player for all accounts that are below the 99th percentile of bandwidth usage, please note that should your bandwidth usage reach the 99th percentile range, Vimeo reserves the right to charge when you monetize Vimeo-hosted videos using a third-party payment solution. This is in addition to charging for excessive use of bandwidth for plays occurring through third-party players and applications (when using the direct links to the video files hosted on Vimeo), as well as when you use our video player with a third-party advertising solution. Please refer to our terms of service for more information: https://vimeo.com/terms.
Should your bandwidth reach the 99th percentile of usage while you are selling content by your own means, someone from our sales team will reach out to you about setting up a custom plan to accommodate your bandwidth use before any additional fees are received.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
Sincerely,.
Pacific Coast US Lead
Followed 5 days later by:
Hi David,
I’m writing to follow up on and clarify a previous point that my colleague [Pacific Coast US Lead] mentioned. Earlier on, [Pacific Coast US Lead] explained that it would be possible as a Premium member to sell content through a custom site, outside of Vimeo’s own Vimeo On Demand (VOD) offering. I’m afraid to say that we inadvertently misled you on that point. In fact, the Enterprise representative you originally spoke with was correct: the only way to sell content as a Premium member on Vimeo is to do so through our VOD service, otherwise you must sign up for an Enterprise account to be able to gain the ability to sell content hosted on Vimeo elsewhere.
Shortly after your exchange with [Pacific Coast US Lead, we double checked on these policies with our Finance and Legal teams. They did confirm that when non-Enterprise Vimeo users embed our player on their websites, their use is subject to our API License Addendum. Under the API terms, users agree that they will not charge a fee to their end users without Vimeo’s prior written consent (Section 3.5). In most cases, the team reviewing these requests for written consent pass them along to our Sales team, since these members are often looking to use Vimeo in ways best suited for an Enterprise plan.
I understand this may be frustrating to learn, since you were originally given information indicating otherwise. However, we do know that you’re working with a number of clients and making recommendations to them, so we did not want to lead you astray or put you or your clients in a position where usage would be in violation of our policies.
On our end, we will be updating our internal documentation to make sure that our own team is clear on these policies and is empowered to share the most accurate, up-to-date information as possible. Thank you so much for your patience and understanding here. Please feel free to let us know if you have any further questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Vimeo Support Supervisor
So it’s very disappointing that this is the way that they’ve gone. We’ll be updating the documentation shortly, and work has already been done on updating to a new open source video player that could be used with self-hosted or CDN video sources. We’ll get something working for ticket sales, it just looks like Vimeo has decided it won’t be them.
I apologize for any potential confusion caused by this.