Vidme

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Vidme
Vidme logo
Vidme - 12-1-17.png
URL vid.me
Status Offline
Archiving status Partially saved - shop.vid.me saved as job:13ha3ibiezo74lj6vantm852r
Archiving type Unknown
Project source vidme-grab
Project tracker https://tracker.archiveteam.org/vidme2/
IRC channel #archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
(formerly #vidmeh (on EFnet))

Vidme was a video hosting site similar to YouTube and Vimeo. It surged in popularity after YouTube started screwing over some of its content creators in the "Adpocalypse".

Shutdown

On December 1st 2017, Vidme's co-founder Warren Shaeffer announced that Vidme was going to be "suspended" at the middle of the month in favor of a newer product. In reality, it reads like a shutdown instead since videos are being erased. When trying to visit the channel pages of users, some information including links to videos, video titles and total view counts are displayed. When trying to visit a video page after the shutdown, it still displays metadata such as title, upload date and former view count of that video.

Goodbye for now[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]

Vidme came a long way as an independent platform, but we couldn’t find a path to sustainability. We’re building something new.

After careful consideration, the Vidme team has arrived at the difficult decision to suspend the Vidme site and apps effective December 15th at noon PT. We’ll use this blog post to explain what this means for users, how we got here, and what’s next for us.

What this means for users

  • New sign-ups and uploads will be disabled effective today.
  • Existing videos will be playable and exportable from your video manager until December 15th at noon PT, at which point they will be permanently deleted from the Vidme servers.
  • All paid channel subscripitions will be suspended immediately, and subscriber-only videos will be exclusively accessible by their video owners.
  • Any outstanding earnings will be paid out upon verification within 60 days.
  • All Vidme paid subscriptions will cease as of today, and subscribers will no longer be billed.

Please see our FAQ for more details, and email us at hello@vid.me with any questions.[1]

The rest of the Medium post goes into detail on why they started the site (hoping to break YouTube's monopoly on revenue sharing to creators), and the struggles they faced when trying to reach their goal.

Site Structure

  • Video's URLs are in this format:
    https://vid.me/<VIDEO_ID>
  • <VIDEO_ID> is a base-64 or base-62 encoded number.
  • It is possible to generate a list of URLs by incrementing the number. The size of <VIDEO_ID> is four or five characters for virtually all videos. This results in theoretically 64^5 = 1,073,741,824 possible <VIDEO_ID>'s.

References