Yup vimeo really sucks in the EU but even still they are the least worst creator friendly vid hosting service, seems to force at least 3 requests to west coast usa, and they seem to rely on akamai for peering, with a pretty lackluster variable streaming rate setup in the client, then again google have really invested heavily in getting direct links to the edge of most major isp’s so comparing any vid performance to youtube is unfair, as they have paid to be artificially close to the source of requests…

Unfortunately it is entirely out of our hands, as vimeo are a 3rd party black box service to us, basically upload and hope their network is up to snuff…, you can get some surprising results if you repeat your tests on 3/4g though, much better performance, i suspect one of the peering deals they have will be with telefonica or similar and or active caching on the mobile networks edge comes into play.

Even more annoying try it with a vpn terminating west coast usa, its pretty much perfect in terms of stream flow, even taking into account the vpn over head and routing weirdness you end up forcing on them lol….

Storage, bandwidth, transcoding, cdn distribution, backups, basically as soon as you are doing more than uploading a few tens of mp4’s longer than 10 mins you run into all sorts of infrastructure problems, and its very expensive in terms of hardware/cloud costs, would be looking at the tens of thousands in terms of infrastructure cost for a service no better than vimeo which has the advantage of economy of scale behind it and costs a lot less, for the satisfaction of not using vimeo but at the cost of budget to attend shows, produce content, pay staff and generally keep producing the content ;).

Unfortunately we are at their mercy, flakey streaming has been a perennial problem with backstager content for years, annoyingly it randomly crops up, with no clear distribution to users or isps involved, then fixes it self when vimeo tweaks their backhaul routing