Why we use Vimeo

As a media production company, how we share our video and animation files matters. We create lots of different types of video content for our clients, ranging from product videos, training animations to testimonials, that are then published online. We also share our own video content in the form of showreels. No matter what type of content we produce or where it’s shared, it needs to look professional. For that reason, we use Vimeo.

Vimeo is a video hosting, sharing and services platform that gives you control of your video content’s appearance, privacy and functionality. Although you can use Vimeo for free, we use a Vimeo Pro account that unlocks a variety of useful features. If you want to find out why we chose Vimeo as our preferred video platform, take a lot at some of our favourite Vimeo features below.

Vimeo is ad free

If our client wants to embed a video or animation on their website rather than uploading the video and subtitle files in the backend, we don’t want unwanted ads interrupting the content and negatively affecting their audience’s experience. Vimeo is ad free so there will never be ads playing before, during, or after video, either on embedded videos or videos on the Vimeo platform. As we mentioned above, we have a Vimeo Pro account. Vimeo can make their platform ad free because they make their money from memberships rather than advertising.

Vimeo’s embed options

Vimeo offers a wide range of embed options that give us and our clients full control of how video content appears when embedded on a website. Below is a list of the different embed options on Vimeo and what functionality they provide:

• Controls – The Controls options enables you to customise how your video appears for viewers once it’s embedded. These options include:
• • Playbar – you can decide whether to have a single play/pause button on the video, or a playbar that allows users to see how long a video has been playing for
  • Volume – if you decide to include a playbar, you can add a volume control to it
  • Speed Controls – if you decide to include a playbar, you can give users the option to have the speed at normal, increase or decrease the playback speed
  • Fullscreen – you can include the Fullscreen option so that users can watch the video in fullscreen mode

• Actions – The Actions options give you control over how viewers interact with your video once it’s embedded on a website. These options include:
• • Like – this gives viewers the option to like the embedded video
  • Watch Later – this gives viewers the option to add the embedded video to their Watch Later list
  • Share – this enables viewers to share the video via social media or email
  • Embed – this provides viewers with the embed code so that they can embed the video on their own website

• Your Details – The Your Details options allow you to choose which Vimeo account details appear on an embedded video. These options include:
• • Profile Picture – you can choose whether your Vimeo profile picture (normally a company logo) appears in the top left-hand corner of the video
  • Title – you can choose whether the video title appears in the top left-hand corner of the video
  • Byline – you can choose whether the Vimeo profile name appears in the top left-hand corner of the video
  • Let Users Decide – enables you to allow users to decide what appears in the embedded video

• Customisation – The Customisation options enable you to customise the branding of an embedded video. These options include:
• • Custom Colour – this allows you to customise the colours of the buttons and playbar that appear on an embedded video. This is useful for branding a video that will appear on a client’s website
  • Display Custom Logo – this allows you to upload a logo that will appear on the embedded video when a mouse hovers over the video
  • Show Logo During Playback – if Display Custom Logo has been selected, you can choose whether this logo appears when the video is played

Vimeo’s privacy options

Vimeo include a variety of privacy options that allow you to control who can access your video content and how. These privacy options include:

• Private – this means that only people with the link can access the video. This is helpful during the review process as individuals can view the video without it being made public
• Password – if the video content is confidential, you can add another layer of security by including a password
• Hide From Vimeo – if you’re creating a client video that’s not intended for the public, such as training videos, you can make the video Private on your account, but embeddable externally
• Only Me – while your video is in production, you can use this option to make the video visible to only you and people in your Vimeo team
• Public – this means that anyone on the internet can see your video

Update videos without disruption

We understand that companies are constantly evolving. A company’s website may have migrated, or the logo may have been refreshed. When it comes to reflecting these changes in older videos, Vimeo provides the perfect solution. In Vimeo you can replace an existing video with a new video file whilst keeping the original video’s URL, likes, comments and any other information associated with the original video. Being able to keep the original URL ensures that any instances where the video has been shared on social media or other websites, the shared URL will not be broken, and the updated video will be shown in its place.

Get client feedback

We find the Review Tools on Vimeo incredibly helpful during the review phase of our video and animation projects. Using the Review Tools, we can invite our clients to provide live feedback on video files in Vimeo. Our clients can add time-coded comments directly to the video from any device without the need to be registered Vimeo users. This helps to prevent any confusion and can reduce the time it takes clients to provide us with feedback via email. Vimeo also has a function called Versions that helps us to track any changes to the video that have been requested by the client against the original version of the video.

Integration with third party apps

Vimeo can integrate with a variety of third-party applications, one of which is Dropbox. We use Dropbox for all our file storage so it’s helpful for us that Vimeo is integrated. We can quickly upload videos directly from Dropbox to Vimeo which is useful for large video files that would normally take a long time to upload manually. As we’ve mentioned above, Vimeo has several privacy options that we can access and use for our videos stored on Dropbox.

Managing Vimeo teams

As we work with multiple clients on multiple projects, we’re members of multiple external Vimeo teams. Through our Vimeo platform we can switch between the different Vimeo teams we’re working with, as well as managing our own Vimeo team and projects. When creating a team in Vimeo you can invite individuals to projects and set permission levels to ensure your workspace and projects stay secure. When adding a new user to your Vimeo team, you can set the following permission levels:

• Uploaders – these users can upload videos to your account, but they are unable to perform any other action or see any parts of your Vimeo account. This is useful for when clients need to share footage with us
• Contributors – these users can upload, replace, embed, and manage video settings in the project they’ve been invited to. Contributors are unable to invite other contributors or see your other projects
• Admins – these users can see all your videos and are able to add other contributors. Admins are usually people from your own company
• Viewers – these users can be invited to projects to view and review content. Viewers can share videos they have access to if the content has not been set to private

Sharing showreels on Vimeo

We use Vimeo to share showreels and examples of our work with prospective clients because it looks professional, has a higher bitrate sound quality compared to other video platforms, and we have control over what content the prospective client sees. Using Vimeo’s Showcases, we can select and group relevant videos to share with clients either publicly or privately. When sharing a Showcase privately, we can include a password and disallow downloads to give our content an added level of protection. As with the embed features mentioned above, we can also customise the Showcase’s appearance, theme, logo and accent colours.

Do you enjoy using Vimeo as much as we do? Share your thoughts and favourite Vimeo features with us, or if you have any questions, please contact us at info@hyperfinemedia.co.uk.