Connecting with creators and the future of video at SXSW

To the Vimeo community:

It's hard to believe I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary with Vimeo. Time has flown by, but it's been filled with incredible feedback and support from our community on where we are taking Vimeo.

In the past three months, our team and I have attended Sundance, Berlinale, and South By Southwest. At all three events, there was a palpable buzz from the creative community about the need to disrupt current business models and increase control of their work. This may be due to Sean Baker's Oscar speech or the growing success of small-budget films; regardless, something is shifting, and creators are eager to explore new avenues for direct discovery, control, and monetization of their content.

At South by Southwest, we did a fireside chat with Kristin Stoller from Fortune, on how AI and technology will bring positive disruption to the big-budget business films and put more control in the hands of creators. This conversation was a highlight of my trip, and there were so many things to cover. Here's a recap:

But before I start, I want to reiterate that Vimeo is deeply committed to protecting creative rights and fostering customer trust. Vimeo does not allow generative AI models to be trained using videos hosted on our platform without your explicit consent, even for our free offerings.

My first observation is that AI and technology are not replacing creators, they are driving creators to tell even more detailed and emotive stories. For example, the 2015 film "Inception" listed 486 artists/visual effects artists in its credits. Ten years later, Mickey 17 lists 783. If you watch both films, I think you will agree the details are simply greater

At SXSW, Vimeo proudly supported Jake Oleson, who beautifully blends real footage with AI to tell immersive stories for platforms like the Apple Vision Pro. Jake's Vimeo-sponsored immersive video required over 16 trillion bytes of video for a 12 minute film, and was so popular that his booth was booked solid for the entire festival, with daily lines forming around the XR Experience Expo for a chance to experience it on the Apple Vision Pro. It was breathtaking, and I recommend you check it out in the Vimeo app on Apple Vision Pro.

We think it's overhyped that AI will kill creativity. Instead, we're seeing filmmakers use AI to be even more creative - vastly improving shots, effects, quality, and immersion. Vimeo is embracing new video formats like 4K live, 8K, and immersive streaming. In some cases, we must support 4-6x more data for the same film length. AI is the enabling technology for us to keep pace with our creators who are pushing boundaries.

My second observation is about discovery and accessibility. So many good stories get stalled in a single language or a single country because they don't get distributed or aren't picked up by the algorithms on big platforms. Monetization is hard because a few big platforms control the gateway to audiences.

Vimeo is proud to be releasing AI features to record, transcribe, summarize, caption, dub, and index videos in dozens of languages. What does that mean? We are using AI to make video and filmmakers more accessible and discoverable all over the world.

The AI services we are launching are some of the most technologically advanced video indexing services in the world. They pick up nuances between frames or videos that most standard AI services simply don't understand. Creators can use this service to better manage the small and large differences between their videos.

But even more exciting, creators can use this same AI to make their work discoverable by search engines, LLMs, or even their own private search experiences in any language they want to be discovered in. We will be launching this new feature for our paid customers that will optimize the algorithms so creators can focus on their story and their audience.

Last but not least, we spent time discussing the economics of the video and filmmaking industry and how there is a growing chasm in funding. Creators either gather $1-$3M from friends and family or get $100M from a big studio that will take 50-65% of the proceeds. Vimeo is launching more choices to help creators directly monetize their work. This month, our Streaming platform is offering more subscription options, digital rights management, geoblocking for zipcode-specific distribution, and even deeper analytics to help creators understand what is landing with their audiences. We are providing all of this at a fraction of the price of what the big platforms would take from the creator. The benefits of creative work should accrue to the creator (not the platform).

As I enter my second year with Vimeo, I am even more excited about the roadmap we have to serve the creative community. There is a quiet revolution that has started against algorithms, traditional distribution, one-sided economics, and creative control. At Vimeo, we are building the same sophisticated technologies used by the big platforms. Still, we are putting it directly into the hands of the individual creator, with higher quality, more choice, more control, in more languages, at a fraction of the cost to the creator… and we are just getting started.

Thank you again to all of our customers and creators who keep us true to our mission to be the most trusted video platform in the world.