Vimeo sucks!

I’ve been complaining about this for a long time and I wanted to do a performance test finally, this was spurred on by Vimeo’s “Hey you wanna try the new Vimeo” banner that I saw tonight when I logged on. I REALLY hoped they had improved some of their LONG STANDING performance issues. But… NO! So I stand by my observations… VIMEO SUCKS.

Also note… this video is hosted on YouTube.

Comments

[cinemaniac]

Chris, your experiment really proves one thing because it doesn't take into account myriad conditions that exist on the internet at any given time. The most significant one is that Comcast is known to intentionally slow down many content providers like iTunes, Vimeo, Netflix, and more because these companies refused to pony up money to Comcast to be a preferred vendor. That is one of the reasons I dumped comcast. Here is just one article telling the tale; you know how to use google so you can find out more.

http://www.itworld.com/legal/131220/data-shows-comcast-really-villain-netflix-case

There are dozens of other possible problems as well, but just to name a few:
1) the route to the CDN could be down or intermittant
2) the CDN hosting the vimeo file could be having server problems
3) the servers at Vimeo might have been slammed with people watching the same video
4) you may have a router or host file config that is causing duplicate packets and confusing the player/browser/TCP-IP stack

etc. I'm not defending Vimeo just trying to correct your bad science :-)

FWIW, I've seen that same exact thing on YouTube, CNN, Netflix, apple.com, etc. at different times. Just because you have lots of bandwidth from one server, in this case the speedtest server, doesn't mean you have it form every server. Indeed, to give you an idea of how skanky comcast is go to their xfinity.comcast.net/speedtest page and see what speed you get and then compare it to every other speedtest site. Comcast tells you they have wicked fast service compared to others but duh, you're on their network going to their server. Of course it will be fastest. But how often do you actually want something from a comcast server? I'm thinking, never.

Cheers,

G

[Paul Toohey]

I highly prefer Vimeo to Youtube. Vimeo doesn't apply compression that affects the image quality as poorly as Youtube does. Not going to lie, I have experienced the issue you speak of a handful of times, but not enough times to turn me against Vimeo.

[Sam Brown]

On FIOS here in So Cal, and Vimeo is like watching TV. Almost instant play, no stopping. Couch Mode is very enjoyable.

Youtube on the other hand will freeze always at 5 secs, then 10secs, etc. into the video until it's fully loaded. Except on the AppleTV which seems to buffer more than my laptop.

[Einar Johnson]

I've seen much the same issues on Vimeo. In fact looking at our Google, Vimeo, and YouTube analytics, I can see that the Vimeo page has the most loads and least plays compared to YouTube. I agree with the above comment about the issues on YouTube's compression, but I'd rather someone see the content in a slightly more than desired compressed format than not bothering to load it at all or giving up halfway through. Good post!

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Chris

Enjoy your site, and on the Digital Convergence podcast. I to am starting to get really fed up with Vimeo's streaming / download speeds. rarely get over 1mbs and sometimes much less, which makes real time streaming of even 720P video impossible. A lot of my viewers have complained they can't stream and have to wind up downloading or pausing the video until it buffers up. Many people don't have the time or patience. Even as a Vimeo consumer of other people's videos as well, I often just give up after the first few minutes of stuttering and pausing. It's ridiculous. And honestly there is no recourse with Vimeo's tech support. My feeling is they have one person who is answering questions, who is very helpful on the forum, and that's it. They have a page as well as a 'report an issue' where you run some IP tracing stuff. Nothing has ever come of it despite going through the problem report page many times.

I have Comcast business class internet, 20mbs download / 5mbs upload and when I test my connection with www.speedtest.net I typically get more than that. I'm a Vimeo paid user for the extra upload quota as well as sometimes I need to post videos longer than 15 minutes and I don't have youtube 'partner' status. I also really like Vimeo's ability to replace an existing video with an updated one. I use that feature a lot, especially when I need to quickly release a video, but realize there need to be more tweaks soon after the release. Also the ability to use a custom thumbnail of my choosing, in contrast to YouTube's random choosing of a Thumbnail. But I have found Youtube's streaming to be far superior to Vimeo's, it's rarely or never as slow as Vimeo.

I'm also a member of ExposureRoom, and I'm considering at least switching videos I've embedded into my various film's websites to it. I haven't really used it much since 2008, but at this point I think Vimeo is hurting my business and keeping me from getting exposure.

Any recommendations other than Youtube?

[Pablo]

You are right man. It really sucks. It makes me nervous.

[Jason]

This is my experience with Vimeo every time, doesn't matter the network or browser.

[Tom]

Thanks for making me feel not alone. It's a shame indeed, but Vimeo does suck. Download speeds aside, isn't the whole sticky playhead issue a much easier problem to fix?

[Ian]

And Vimeo is still like this 2 years later.