Yes, Vid.me. A video platform that grew fairly popular in the wake of YouTube's first round of self-destructive action. As YouTube began to cater to advertisers as opposed to their content creators, "the humans" over at vid.me launched an arguably clever little propaganda stint about being a platform supporting free speech...that sure has come around to fiercely bite them in the ass.

Vid.me is like the odd, awkward weeaboo cousin of YouTube. And let's face it, YouTube isn't much of a "friend" as-is. Vid.me is  likable enough. One can let them hangout for a little bit, and actually enjoy their company. But it's inevitable...the moment someone says a single critical word about them or something they like, a full snowflake fury erupts. Irrational behavior and poor decisions follow.

But the elephant in the room is the hypocrisy. Flouting their statements on supporting free speech and being "creator-friendly", it is common to see both passive and outright censorship occurring. Common being the keyword. One of the major forms of passive censorship was removing and preventing any video "tagged" as political from the site's trending section. Furthermore, staffers have the capability to alter categories on whim. So if there is a message that they do not like, well, off to quarantine it goes. And if that isn't enough already, add to it that the staffers have no problem featuring a political video if it lines up with their sentiments.

I recently have seen some videos going up by select users speaking of a 50 Gigabyte storage limit. Every creator that has made one of these kind of videos has far surpassed the 50 GB limit, meaning they will have to go through their content and pick what stays and goes. Or, "the humans" will happily do so. And I bet we all know what videos they'll be removing...but this development got me fairly curious. Some argue that it is a cost concern. Others argue that it is selective censorship...the latter looking more likely.

Selective censorship began to become more and more of a likely explanation after having seen a comment on one such video stating that vid.me is more-or-less a UI for Amazon Cloudfront; a Content Delivery Network. They also went into how much it all costs, etc. Well, the comment has vanished. Which told me there must be something to that. Either it was a little too close to truth, or it was complete rubbish. So I dug a little myself.

Vid.me was founded January 17, 2014 by Warren Shaeffer and Alex Benzer. On April 7th of the following year, they  gained an additional 3.2 million USD in private funding from nine sources, one being completely undisclosed. On December 2016, another 6 million USD was provided by seven sources. These are the only disclosed funding records.

There is surprisingly little information made available about Vid.me or it's parent company BitKitchen. An article here or blog post there that serve little more than propaganda. As far as actual company information...there's virtually zilch. I did find another, and rather curious financial report that states a total funding of 18.4 million USD. Whether that is some sort of fluke or there's more to that report, I'm not sure yet. The source requires requests, and that takes time if the request is granted at all.

So what of the claims that vid.me is little more than a UI for AWS CloudFront? That turned out to be true, at least to an extent. With a simple page inspection, one can find all the source links for various site properties, including where the video is hosted. Which is indeed on a CloudFront network domain (jargon-lingo/url_noise/blah-blah/cloudfront.net). I considered the possibility of CloudFront being used to merely "skin" the site page. However, the fact that videos are streamed from a CloudFront source is a bit hard to ignore. 

That would mean that vid.me doesn't "own" it's infrastructure or hardware, but leases it through Amazon Web Services. Not a bad thing in-and-of-itself. The pricing, as far as a business solution goes, is remarkably cheap. Such as the first 10 Terabytes of data transfer out only costing 0.082 USD per gigabyte per month. That would mean that at it's most expensive, the bill would be 850 USD plus any applicable taxes. And while the end price goes up as data transfer increases, AWS offers the standard bulk discounts that most other services offer. At the most extreme level of data transfer, surpassing 5 petabytes of data out per month, the bill sums up to 20,000 USD per month plus any applicable taxes. With a monthly traffic of approximately 5.5 thousand, I don't see how infrastructure lease costs could surpass perhaps a few thousand dollars. It certainly isn't surpassing that 5 petabyte mark. So I simply cannot accept that a storage limit, especially on only select users, is a symptom of upkeep costs.

I'm not knocking vid.me for using a third-party solution. It's actually pretty smart. Much cheaper than, say, owning and operating a dedicated facility. However, trying to rationalize selective limits with an excuse of costs takes a huge blow when your CEO has an estimated revenue of 1.1 million USD. Apparently your company is doing pretty well, profit-side. At least your CEO is.

And this kind of response...well...I'll let you see it:

What does Vimeo, an entirely different service architecture, have to do with anything? Just...you get it. Terrible argument to make.

At the end of this little dig, I've come to the conclusion that BitKitchen and their "major brand" Vid.me are, for the lack of a better term, conniving. Videos aren't my thing, but I'd have a better chance of not getting shutdown on YouTube than I would on vid.me.