I should have saved more of the vids I enjoyed...

[ratcreature]

It looks like Vimeo has switched its business strategy (apparently their share price collapsed since their IPO?) and now ask very high hosting prices of several thousand dollars from the "top 1% bandwidth users", only the baseline for this percentage is apparently every inactive account without any traffic, if someone whose top video has 815 views is already counted as that, as described in this article here.

I'm not a big vid watcher, and in recent years the vids I have watched I mostly just streamed rather than saving anything (even if it was possible to save without a lot of fiddling when streaming services hinder downloads). I regret that now. Looks like a lot of vids might be about to vanish. :(

Comments

[mellowtigger]

Between economics and legalities, many of the videos I've linked over the last decade (and more) have disappeared. There are surely more efficient and fair tech solutions, but I suspect that the fiction of intellectual property will always get in the way of who can store, use, or share what. I've long assumed that anything I keep on YouTube, gmail, or yahoo mail can just "disappear" at any time. I pay for my own cloud storage at DreamHost, just in case.

[ratcreature]

Doesn't look like IP is the issue here. I mean yes, it's harder to find hosting for vids because platforms like YouTube screen stuff, but the examples in the article are all original content creators whose main issue with YouTube is that it's not as amenable to locked subscribers, and also vimeo is integrated with Patreon. And many of these users were even already paying vimeo.

It's more that this convenient paid hosting service that many fans also use is reorienting towards bigger business customers, and as fallout a lot of fan content will vanish, just like when geocities folded.

For the likelihood of things just vanishing for me as fan content consumer, I don't think personal websites work out better. They frequently are even more precarious.

My sadness is mostly because I'm lazy and vids from streams were often much harder to save than fanfic, so I generally don't have that personal backup of favorites that I do have for most fanfic I have enjoyed.

[schneefink]

I too got out of the habit of downloading vids out of laziness. I'll probably only find out when I can't find specific ones anymore...

[ratcreature]

Yeah. It's not that I don't know better -- in theory -- but laziness and convenience are powerful forces... :/