Vimeo suddenly scraps plans for subscription video service

Vimeo has suddenly scrapped plans for a subscription video service, eight months after it declared it was going to take on Netflix, Hulu and YouTube Red.

In a brief statement it announced overnight, "Vimeo has confirmed that it has decided not to proceed in offering a subscription based original program service scheduled to begin in ’18.”

In November 2016 it boasted it was going to spend “tens of millions” on the initiative which was to come live next year.

As recently as March, it had brought in Paramount Pictures’ Alana Mayo to head up its original development efforts.

It also hired executives from Hulu and Bunim-Murray for its development and acquisitions teams, which had been working to acquire content for the subscription offering.

Now the teams have been broken up.

Vimeo interim head Joey Levine admitted, “This was a difficult decision — the idea of pursuing an SVOD service for Vimeo has always been intriguing, and I would have loved to see the incredibly talented Alana Mayo’s programming vision realized here at Vimeo.

“She and her team are creative, sharp risk-takers, and I believe will all, to a person, have an incredible future in programming.

“But the opportunity ahead for Vimeo to empower creators is too large and too important for us to attack with anything other than absolute focus and clarity.”

Rather than becoming more consumer-orientated, the company is apparently going to refocus on its 750,000-strong creator community which uses the service to distribute videos.

With Netflix’s plans to spend US$6 billion a year to generate new original content and YouTube starting down the same path, perhaps Vimeo figured offering a rival service was going to be a bigger task than it thought.