End of an Era

Vimeo Sells to Bending Spoons!

It feels out of the blue, yet makes total sense. While the Vimeo of the 2010s, the beloved video platform/community of choice for the global creative class, has been gone for a while, the slow-dawning realization of this fact by filmmakers has overshadowed the fact that the business itself has been in freefall post-COVID.

Vimeo was spun out of IAC as a public company in 2021 at a valuation of $8.5B. It is now being taken private again by the Italian company Bending Spoons for just $1.38B. Even that number represents a premium of 91% over Vimeo’s 60-day, volume-weighted average share price.

I don’t want to go over the timeline, but I thought that this post, while hyperbolic in that LinkedIn sort of way, does a phenomenal job of laying out the key pivot points that, over the past decade, led Vimeo to this spot.

So, who is Bending Spoons? It’s a portfolio company of brands targeted for rehabilitation. They look for legacy tech companies that have fallen on hard times but still possess cachet and decent customer bases. In recent years, they’ve bought Evernote, WeTransfer, and Meetup. Then, following a private equity-style playbook, they look to be ruthlessly efficient in minimizing costs and maximizing revenue, bringing fresh expertise and perspective in hopes of getting dysfunctional companies unstuck.

It’s unclear what this means for Vimeo, and the press release for the deal is fairly boilerplate regarding Bending Spoons’ vision. But, for those of us who pine for a revival of Vimeo’s creator-centric vibe and ecosystem, I’m moderately pessimistic. Improvement is possible—Bending Spoons doesn’t like to think of themselves as simple efficiency consultants; it has chops of its own, and justifiably touts the massive improvements they have made to the Evernote product. Yet, impressions elsewhere are not so rosy, as observers and users of WeTransfer have decried many Bending Spoon decisions, including laying off 75% of the existing team upon takeover, and capping the services’ free tier.

Vimeo could use some basic discipline—the company’s subreddit is rife with complaints of predatory billing practices, and its withdrawal from the EU last year was so ineptly communicated that its support staff took to linking users to my speculative and completely unreported newsletter post to explain what the hell was going on. Still, it had been taking some positive steps—as recently as a month ago, I optimistically wondered if the company was trying and lure audiences back. This acquisition throws that into question.

If Bending Spoons wants to support these baby steps, I’ll be happy. But they haven’t demonstrated any interest or expertise in community-building to date, and penny-pinching around functionality is part of what has turned Vimeo’s core subscribers off in recent years. Even $1.38B is pricey for an unprofitable company, and so my mind ponders the AI question. Vimeo came out strongly in 2024, saying they will not use customer videos to train AI. Will Bending Spoons honor that promise? The company sparked backlash in July with the clumsy rollout of new terms of service for WeTransfer, a move many people suspected as a sneaky attempt to approve AI training on users’ files. The Vimeo collection would figure to be a goldmine in the AI wars. Either way, we’ll be paying close attention.

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Jordan Peele-Produced Horror Shorts Anthology Debuts at TIFF - Titled No Drama, the collection of five shorts from indie filmmakers selected via contest played out-of-competition at the festival last weekend and features a new one from S/W alum Ariel Zengotita. Watch the trailer above.

2. More TIFF! - The fest is almost over, and while we have to wait a little bit for awards, brush up on this year’s Short Cuts lineup via a handy Shortverse collection. It was also a massive year for S/W alums with features at the fest, and we celebrate their accomplishment with a collection.

3. Netflix Eyes Short Doc Oscar - Fresh off TIFF and a debut at Telluride, Josh Seftel’s doc short, All the Empty Rooms, has been scooped up by Netflix. This is the first short they’ve picked up this award season, and they’ve got an Oscar-qualifying run set for next week in NYC.

4. TROPFEST Lives Again - The massive Australian shorts event announces plans for its return in 2026. TropFest, if you don’t know it, was a weird one—filmmakers would make a short specifically for the festival, then ten finalists would stream live to massive viewing parties across Australia. In its heyday, the audience would number in the hundreds of thousands! The fest launched several top film talents in the country, but hasn’t been particularly relevant for 15 years. YouTube is intimately involved in this reboot and will stream the finalists globally—a generous partnership that probably doesn’t have anything to do with the service being banned for kids under 16 in the country.

5. New and Inventive OK Go Music Video - OK Go is not the most relevant of bands musically, but one must love their longtime commitment to excellence in the music video medium. Their latest taps two of our favorite design-oriented animators, Lucas Zanotto and 4-time alum, Will Anderson, in a cool piece that plays with real-time motion capture.

6. Sayonara Hara Urara - A beloved Japanese icon died this week, Hara Urara, a racehorse famous for losing all of her 113 races. The legend of Urara was famously commemorated in Mickey Duzyj’s 2016 short, The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere.

7. Gloomy Eyes: the Game Is Out - GLOOMY EYES from 2019 is one of the best VR narrative stories ever. From a team that includes 3DAR (Shave It, Uncanny Valley), it was a widely celebrated prestige project for VR, boasting voice work from Colin Farrell. So it’s interesting—and perhaps telling for the medium—that it has transformed into a game, released today.

8. The Sphere Isn’t a Concert Venue. It’s a Movie Theater - Lucas Shaw via his Screen Time newsletter relates how movies at the Las Vegas Sphere present a potentially massive business. I’m a fan, making my maiden visit to the venue in January, and checking out the similarly themed COSM in Los Angeles last month.

9. Sizing Up a Potential Paramount-WBD Merger - David Ellison is throwing his weight around with trial balloons about buying Warner Bros. Deadline does a thought exercise on what that might mean for Hollywood.

10. What To Watch This Weekend - Our roundup of S/W alums in theaters or on TV hits a backlog! Let’s breeze through:

    • Splitsville, from the acclaimed duo of Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino (The Climb), went wide in the US last week. But, the Neon-released feature still needs a boost to crack the box office top ten. We can confirm that it is hilarious, go see it!

    • Twinless is also in theaters. Written and directed by James Sweeney, you might remember this one causing a stir at Sundance when fans ripped the Sundance-at-Home screener and made clips go viral on Tik Tok. Let’s make sure that’s not what the film is remembered for.

    • Finally, it feels like it’s been ages since the last appointment-viewing HBO show, but Task might be it. The follow-up from showrunner Brad Ingelsby to Mare of Easttown, he entrusted S/W alum Jeremiah Zagar with directing the first episode, and what can I say? I’m hooked already.

🤖 AI Corner

As intimated above, the biggest news in AI video might just be Vimeo’s sale if its new owner wants to change policy on using user videos for AI training. 👀 

For now, here’s our periodic update of headlines and happenings that caught our eye.

• Mentioned in a previous newsletter, the full conversation between Daniel Kwan and Jaron Lanier about the need for creative industries to organize against Big Tech and AI. (Berggruen Institute YouTube)

• Animation Jobs & AI: A new report is out. (Cartoon Brew)

• Still Image to Full 3D World: a new Chinese model Impresses (X.com)

• Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) believes AI can help rebuild ‘broken’ industry (The Guardian)

• Anthropic to pay $1.5B settlement over copyright violations (Deadline)

• Netflix Releases Guidelines to Content Partners on AI Use (Netflix Blog)

• OpenAI Backs AI-Made Animated Feature from Paddington team. (Wall Street Journal)

• Orson Welles’ daughter lashes out about AI-firm’s plan to reconstruct father’s ‘lost’ film. (Instagram)

• Italy’s REPLY AI Film Fest announces winners (Press Release)

• Dolby Vision 2 goes beyond HDR with more AI (The Verge)

📅 This Week on Short of the Week