On November 20, Vimeo switches off On Demand. Every film sold through it stops streaming that day - including the ones viewers already paid for - and those purchases can't be moved to another platform.
Nobody did anything wrong there. A company changed its plans, and the work went with the decision. It's a good moment to ask a plain question about any platform holding your films: what actually happens when something breaks?
Here's our answer, without the jargon. Everything below is how Long Play works today - we checked each point against the live system before writing it down.
When a server has a bad day
Long Play is watched every five minutes by an independent monitoring service, from outside our own servers. You don't have to take our word for how reliable we are: the history is public on our status page. Since that monitoring started in April, the site has been up more than 99.99% of the time.
We also get an alert the moment real viewers' videos start failing, stalling or starting slowly - so we hear about playback problems from the platform itself, not from your inbox.
When a delivery network has a bad day
Videos reach viewers through a content delivery network, with copies kept in Sydney and Los Angeles so they start quickly wherever your audience is. Even the biggest networks have bad afternoons - one of the largest had a major outage this July. If ours has trouble, the player moves viewers to a second, completely separate network on its own, usually within a few seconds, without restarting the film.
When the viewer's Wi-Fi drops
This one isn't our fault, but it's still our problem. If a viewer's connection cuts out halfway through, the player waits for it to come back and carries on from a few seconds before where it stopped - no reloading the page, no hunting for the right minute.
When a storage company has a problem
Your original file - at the full quality you uploaded, 4K included - is stored with Backblaze. Once it's a day old, a second copy is kept with Google Cloud, a completely separate company. Both are encrypted at rest. If something went badly wrong at either one, your work would still exist at the other.
The platform's own records - your account, your video details, your settings - are backed up every night to both companies as well. A backup you've never restored is just a hopeful file, so we test it: this week we pulled a full copy back and checked it was complete and intact. It took 15 seconds.
When you delete something by mistake
It happens. Deleted videos are held for eight days before they're permanently removed, so a slip of the finger isn't the end of anything. Contact us within that time and we'll bring it back.
When Long Play itself changes
This is the one most platforms don't talk about, and it's the one that just caught Vimeo's sellers. Our Permanence Pledge commits to at least 90 days' notice before any significant change to how your work is distributed - and if Long Play is ever sold, merged or closed, 90 days' notice and a one-click export of every original file before any of it takes effect.
You don't have to wait for a bad day to use it. Library export works today, and every original carries a fingerprint you can check for yourself to confirm it's exactly what you uploaded.
The short version
Things break - networks, companies, Wi-Fi, fingers on delete buttons. What matters is whether the platform planned for it before it happened. We did, and we've written it all down in one place: Reliability & security.
If you're moving films off Vimeo On Demand before November 20, our guide to leaving Vimeo On Demand walks through it step by step.