Vimeo Celebrates Its 10th Birthday With Tribute Video

YouTube wasn’t the only online video website to turn ten this year. As of February 16, 2015, Vimeo is a decade old, too. To celebrate, the video hosting and distribution site has created a one-minute clip reviewing key Vimeo moments from the past several years.

Vimeo created the birthday clip to acknowledge “a decade of supporting filmmakers.” The b-day tribute video starts by showing a part of the first video uploaded to Vimeo on February 16, 2005. Vimeo’s celebratory clip then goes on to feature behind-the-scenes videos of Vimeo staff, images from various company initiatives like Vimeo’s mobile app, and milestones like the introduction of Vimeo Pro.

And in honor of Vimeo hitting double digits, here are some facts about the video sharing site that was once a haven for the artsy set, but is now steadily making its way into the mainstream.

The site was actually founded in December 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein.
Much like YouTube’s story, Vimeo existed for a few months before a video was uploaded to the site. Lodwick uploaded the first video to his newly-created site on February 16. Titled “Good morning, universe,” the 30-second clip shows Lodwick smiling at the camera while in bed and turning the camera to show the view out his window.

A couple years later in 2007, Lodwick would be kinda sorta infamously let go from the company (but now before he orchestrated one of the best Lip Dubs of all time).

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

You could only upload 20MB of video to Vimeo in 2005.
This number slowly went up over time, to 30MB in 2006 to 250MB in 2007. Now, basic Vimeo users are allowed 500MB, as well as the benefit of uploading 1 HD video, per week.

Vimeo hit the 1 million videos mark inn September 2008.
Vimeo’s Andrew Pile wrote a blog post marking the achievement. He also noted 100,000 of the million clips were in HD, and that the site was looking at adding an additional 130,000 uploads by the end of September alone. Despite the growing numbers, Pile said, “Vimeo feels just as intimate and friendly as it did in January of 2005 when we had all of 3 new videos.”

You can check out more of Vimeo’s history on this nifty timeline the online video platform has put together.