Vimeo makes Video hosting affordable for small businesses

Online video continues to experience explosive growth. Recent predictions show that video will account for 50% of all consumer Internet traffic by the end of 2012. Nearly 60 percent of viewers watch video before reading text on the same webpage and are more likely to make a purchase. This year, 83 percent of small businesses plan to use social media channels for their business. With the web rapidly moving from text to video, small businesses need to adapt to the shift in technology or quickly become irrelevant or less impactful to their consumers who expect to see video everywhere online.

“Until now, quality video hosting has been expensive, confusing, and extremely difficult for a small business owner to understand. Small businesses have fallen between the cracks of free video services and massive enterprise video solutions,” said Dae Mellencamp, Vimeo’s General Manager. “Vimeo PRO resolves the contradiction that best-of-breed video quality and hosting can also be easy and affordable.”

Vimeo developed its PRO account, which will exist as a separate service outside of the Vimeo.com community, based on demand for a cost-effective video-hosting service equipped with core features that meets the growing needs of small businesses. It’s priced at $199 for 50GB of storage and 250,000 plays as a flat annual fee. Customers can purchase increased storage capacity in 50GB increments for $199. Businesses can also purchase additional plays in increments of 100k for $199. Vimeo PRO is one of the most affordable professional video hosting solutions on the market.

Enabling small businesses to compete with larger companies, Vimeo PRO offers robust product features including exceptional video quality, customizable Portfolio websites, extensive video player customization, Video Review Pages, advanced statistics, social media sharing and broad privacy settings. Production companies will be able to create many separate portfolios and share rough cuts with clients. Restaurants can show their atmosphere and signature dish preparation online to potential diners. Real estate agents can provide home hunters with higher quality housing previews. And, even doctors can create private groups to educate patients and medical students.

Customers can upload up to a 5GB file at a time with no time limits and Vimeo will not run any advertising over their videos.Coupled with its current array of popular features like HD and HTML5 video, full tablet, mobile and connected TV support, and Vimeo Video School, Vimeo PRO provides all the major tools small businesses need to host videos online. In addition, Vimeo PRO accounts can opt-in to the Community Pass, which is a feature that allows PRO accounts to interact with the Vimeo.com community as long as the account and each individual video abide by the community guidelines.