What was known as a purely ‘Video on Demand’ platform, Vimeo announces Vimeo Live, the ability to livestream on the website. This is in part thanks to the acquisition of Livestream.com, a leading platform for live event streaming which will provide top quality tools for Vimeo users.

While this is obviously meant for larger businesses and corporate events, it is interesting to see such a drastic difference in price models compared to something like Twitch/Mixer/YT Gaming.

Yes, you’re looking at the price plans correctly. In order for you to use the Live feature of Vimeo you will need to buy into a plan. Not only that but unless you purchase the tier 2 plan, you will only get 5 hours of streaming per month and even at the tier 2 level your streams will be capped at 5 hours. Looking between the lines you’ll notice the prices are labeled as if you bought in annually. Want to pay monthly? You’ll be paying at an approx 40% increase per month.

Now there is a trial period, but careful with your time because if you stream more than 15 minutes you’ll be ineligible for a refund!

Vimeo seems to be targeting a very specific group. Large corporate/business productions might want to buy into it. Even when you look at their recommended list of encoders you can see most are hardware meant for big live events, not for streaming games on a home PC.

That being said if you are someone who has a large following on Vimeo already, it may be something useful for your productions. Features like being able to replace your livestream VoDs with 4K quality videos afterwards are definitely attractive for people that want the best quality.

While a service like this is not for the masses or even for more game-centric livestreams, it goes to show how popular livestreaming is becoming and how it is influencing websites to invest in it.

For a full list of features and pricing, you can check out the Vimeo Live page.