I was a vimeo customer for over five years and a pro member for the past 3 years (paid monthly -$9.99). It's a great alternative to YouTube but one of the most shady business models i've ever encountered. If you at ANY TIME downgrade... (say you pay for pro for 11 months... on the twelve month they can literally hold all your videos hostage. The past few months I haven't been recording many new video so I didn't think I needed to keep paying pro. (My plan / what i usually do is upgrade again once I had some new videos to upload. (for example I am a soccer coach and upload my game tapes during the season, don't really use / need the extra features during the offseason) as soon as you drop to basic it doesn't matter if you been a member for 10 years they lock up all your videos until you pay again... scare tactics and it doesn't matter how many videos you delete to create space (I had over 160 short uploads) I deleted over 100 videos on my acount believing it would unlock the others - It did not.) I then deleted every "non hostage" video... to the point to where I had zero videos on my actual account... yes I could've just paid the 10 bucks and got them all back (thankfully i had them backed up); but I was absolutely blown away by immorality of the entire situation... Paying for 3 years has no incentive or benefit in any way whatsoever... here I was a customer that had paid for pro (not using any of the benefits for months) because I had no footage but her they still kept charging my card, I could have uploading 5 GB per month and uploaded 0 for several months, where's my roll over for that? Nada... we aren't talking access to source videos... bur get this a you can't EVEN DELETE your "locked" videos, you cannot access them in any way (maybe via cache files) and you cant even play them. (regardless if 1 min or 3 hours long).
I left you youtube long ago long for alternative because the ads were outrageous, now I'm willing to sit through ads for the rest my life vs. invest in a (slowly sinking anyway) company like Vimeo! The no ads is great until you realize viewing content advertising is much better than stealing your own content... that you recorded and created - and havin that taken asslssg hol