Last Summer, I wrote a post bragging on Vimeo for being the most cost-effective solution for churches that want to share their videos on the web. This winter, Cleve and I both have been tasked with researching live streaming and other video options as our ministries continue to grow. After taking a good look at the other solutions available in the marketplace, I still feel like Vimeo offers the most “bang-for-your-buck” for embedded, non-streaming video clips. Here’s why…
- It averages out to about 5 bucks a month. The Vimeo Plus service that gives you 5GB of uploads a week and unlimited bandwidth is still only $60/year. No other video service that I encountered comes close.
- It’s social media friendly. When I upload our messages to Vimeo, I know it’s going to be easy for our audience to share it however they like. Even better, Facebook automatically creates a video share button whenever I post a clip to our Fan Page, giving our audience an easy way to catch up on the previous Sunday. That kind of convenience just makes everything easier.
- It’s very customizable. If you have the Vimeo Plus service, you’ll be surprised by how much control you have over the look of the player. You can customize it to pretty much any environment, and the options only get better as their service continues to expand.
- Mobile support is coming! Just over a week ago, I received an invite to test out the upcoming mobile expansion of the Vimeo service. The mobile versions of our videos seem to work great on my iPhone (the quality looks to be excellent), and I’m excited to integrate this into our mobile site instead of just linking to our existing video podcast.
With all of that said, I still believe Vimeo to be the best solution for a church or ministry that is looking for an inexpensive but high-quality way to share their messages online. There are better solutions out there for actual streaming (live or otherwise), but that will be a seperate post from us in the near future.
Have anything to add or take away from our Vimeo recommendation? Let us know in the comments below.
I love Vimeo a lot myself i have also found that the colors on the videos are better compared to youtube and the simplicity of the website is great!
Thanks for the update. We’re going to start using Vimeo at my home church andI’m super juiced about the mobile support. That ads a ton of value to the package.
P.S. 3 Erics FTW!!
Your timing was perfect on this post as I’m currently looking into the archived video space for our site. We had also settled on Vimeo but I’m now looking into how to display the archives. From what you’ve shared previously it looks like Long Hollow’s is a custom build solution, but are you aware of any tools available to assist in this? Or am I stuck with digging into the API myself?
Just a volunteer for the site so I’ll take the shortcuts where I can get ‘em.
For live streaming we’ve settled on livestream.com. We still testing out the free version but the live feeds have been great.
Dang, we were on a roll with the “Erics” until Brent came along and ruined everything…
Brent: Just kidding
Thanks for the comment. Yes, Long Hollow is a custom solution that generates the structure you see on our Watch/Listen archives. The video is powered by Vimeo and the audio/older video is built through the JW Flash Player.
You can see Cleve’s take on a similar structure at http://www.chapel.org/messages. Through a lot of conversation, we found that this is the most easily digestible way to organize your messages (in our opinion at least).
Let us know what you come up with!
[...] think I’ve been pretty transparent about my love of Vimeo in the past; frankly put, I think they’re the best video site on the web… and I [...]