Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.
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Vimeo
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Vimeo is a video experience platform. They enable anyone to create high-quality video experiences to connect and bring ideas to life. They proudly serve their growing community of nearly 300 million users — from creative storytellers to globally distributed teams at the world's largest companies.
Vimeo Pro stacks up quite well compared to each of the alternative services we have used. Since its integration was not as easily implemented for our own site for publishing client videos vs. JW Platform, we chose JW over Vimeo. However, as a point of syndication so that each …
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
For an overall professional appearance of Vimeo, I think it looks fabulous for the clients we work with. I think it works extremely well to host videos for courses and training that can be paid training. The privacy feature is great for that. I've never used it for going LIVE and wonder if that might be a good option for businesses but since I haven't tried it, I'm not of the capabilities. And I'm not sure how the clients are able to get on the LIVES. It does have so many new features since I started 4 years ago, and that means that there is a higher learning curve if you want to make full use of this platform.
Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
User-friendly interface for administrators of the account and external viewers. Being able to easily navigate a new platform or software is ideal for anyone.
Seamless sharing and embedding across many platforms. Vimeo is well-recognized so it makes it easy for other platforms to recognize Vimeo. The compatibility is outstanding.
As an administrator of the account, being able to select viewing privileges may seem like a basic function, but it's so necessary right now with how heavy our organization is utilizing the platform. We can mass upload content early and only release it for the public over time by simply changing it to a public video.
Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
Price - For the full featureset of Vimeo, you will be paying $900 a year as of 2020, and this is expected to only go up over time. Thankfully, Vimeo offers lower tiers with less functionality, and most people will not need the unlimited streaming viewers or whopping 7 TB of storage that you get for the highest level of membership. But it is still a premium price for a premium service.
"Suggested" Algorithm - The equivalent of YouTube's suggested videos feature is the Vimeo Staff Picks, which recommends curated content from their team of editors. While this content generally has a high level of production, it is not especially relevant to the video you are watching, or to your watch history as a user. I rarely watch suggested videos in Vimeo.
Search - The Vimeo search page is beautiful, having huge thumbnails of videos with a clean, visually-appealing layout. However, the results themselves leave much to be desired. When I search for "jung" to try to find videos on Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, of the first 18 results, not a single result is actually about C. G. Jung. On Youtube, the first 14 results are all about Jung. When I search for "c. g. jung" on Vimeo I find a number of relevant results, so it's not that the videos are not available in Vimeo. Rather, the search algorithm is not returning relevant results.
I usually extract the links of all lectures from the embed code, but now Vimeo is not allowing that feature. Instead, I have to copy the whole embed code and then extract the URL from the embed code separately. This process has become cumbersome and a bit of hassle since I don't need the whole embed code.
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
The design is clean and intuitive for the most part, which allows for ease of use by both novice and experience users. We are grateful for the ways that the front-end video player is easy to navigate and intuitive to use, and the backend is generally designed the same way. Tools and options are where you expect to find them, and it was easy to navigate the storage on the backend through folders and content filters
Vimeo does well in performance with systems with ease. I have not encountered any issues with loading pages or slowing down in other software or systems.
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Terrible support. When I subscribed to Premium we were guaranteed support. However, after the first e-mail I received from them, I never heard from them again. I sent several emails over the course of a couple of weeks acknowledging that due to covid, I did not expect a miracle overnight and that I was keen to work on the issue with them. I have not heard from customer service at all. This is very disappointing. We lost customers due to the poor quality of the livestreams and were left to sort the issue out without their help.
Vimeo does provide the legwork of content curation and management of sources. The quality of content is not bad from a viewer's point of view. I think the analytics could use a little bit of improvement, only because my department has a lot of users.
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
YouTube was the platform we primarily used previously, after having restrictions and having locked out of a couple of accounts we needed a better platform. We also lost some of our videos. We also have an internal app to track client videos and Vimeo supported it better. With the increased storage and the number of videos we create, we decided Vimeo would be better.
Everything works fine in Vimeo, and the users like the quality and sound of the lectures when viewed on Absorb LMS. They can view the lectures on the desktop and mobile devices.
It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
