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Vimeo goes pro

Small businesses should like the new Pro version of Vimeo's reasonable price and understandable capacity ceiling.

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Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman

Users of the Pro version of the embeddable Vimeo player can customize its logo. Vimeo

Vimeo, the video streaming service for artistes, is getting a crass, commercial sibling. Until today the service has not allowed commercial use. While anyone can post a video online for free, and "Plus" members, for $60 a year, can get additional features like an ad-free player for their videos, the clean and high-quality service has not had a potentially lucrative business-focused subscription service.

Today that changes, with Vimeo Pro. The standout feature of the Pro-level package is its low price: $199 a year. That gets users 50GB of storage, and 250,000 video plays per year. On the Pro accounts, Vimeo doesn't track bandwidth.

Vimeo Pro is designed for small businesses that need video hosting, and will compete with services like Viddler, SproutVideo, and Google Apps Business Video. Vimeo's baseline service is a lot less expensive. Large enterprises that need to play more vids have a separate tier of companies to choose from, like Brightcove, Ooyala, and Limelight.