Vime-nooo!

💔 Vimeo Withdraws Discovery in the EU

Yesterday I woke to news in Slack from Céline. She’s currently in France and reported that navigating to the Vimeo Staff Picks channel redirects her to a new landing page. The page doesn’t have any Staff Picks but recommends visiting a new portal on the European Film Awards website.

We mentioned Vimeo’s announced partnership with the European Academy two weeks ago but, at the time, it seemed like a minor sponsorship. Now, not so much. Check out this message on that initial Staff Picks page redirect.

Using a VPN I confirmed that users in France, the Netherlands, and Germany can no longer utilize website search, access their user feed, or browse channels. Staff Picks redirects to the new partnership page, but the Short of the Week channel, one among thousands of such user-curated collections, returns a “this page isn’t available in your region” message. When navigating to individual user profiles, you can no longer browse user collections, showcases, follow, or message users.

An email to Staff Pick alumni sheds a bit more light. Informing them about the EFA partnership and asking them to opt-in to display their work on the EFA website, they mention, “We also want to share that as part of our compliance with local regulations, curated pages like the Staff Picks channel will no longer be available on Vimeo.com in the EU and UK.”

It is unclear what these “local regulations” are, but wow. I think it’s been well understood that changing priorities at the company have served to de-emphasize the idea of Vimeo as a community viewing platform in recent years, with the company even going so far as to say “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube” in a 2022 shareholder letter. But there is a big difference between de-prioritization and elimination!

What are the practical effects of these changes? Videos from EU-based accounts still work. If you have the direct link to a video or it is embedded on an external page such as Short of the Week and Shortverse, global audiences can still watch it. Password-protected videos appear to work as normal and EU-based videos circulate the site as normal outside the region. However, if you upload to Vimeo to attract an audience to your work, this is now a huge area of the world that is essentially cut off from that.

The reach and prestige of Staff Picks will take a hit too. Rather than an attempt to bolster the venerated curatorial channel in Europe, it feels like the European Film Awards partnership was instead a lifeboat to help preserve what could be saved of the SP brand on the continent.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Shortverse Best of the Month - Our latest collection of great shorts that were made public on Shortverse this past month. Hard-hitting political docs on the US election sit side by side with absurdist animated loops. Check them out!

2. Why Hollywood Won’t Make Room for the Next Generation - A thought-provoking long read in The Hollywood Reporter caused a stir online, as Mia Galuppo questions if some of the entertainment industry’s issues are due to old leaders hoarding power and preventing the ascension of new blood.

3. Congrats to The Gotham Award nominees - The first of the major award shows, arriving in early December, the NYC-based Gotham Awards announced their nominees. It’s light in S/W alums this year, but kudos to Jane Schoenbrun and Sean Wang whose films receive recognition.

4. IDA Documentary Awards Releases their Shortlist - One of 3 main award previews to Oscar contention in the documentary field (alongside Doc NYC Shortlist, and the Cinema Eye Honors), the International Documentary Association releases its shortlist of 20 feature and 20 short docs.

5. Animated Short Longlist Unveiled - A valuable resource every year, Animation Magazine has compiled a massive list of Oscar-eligible short animations into one hefty article.

6. Blast From the Past: Too Many Cooks Turns 10 - It’s still exceedingly rare for a short film to break into mainstream cultural discourse and while there are shorts with many more views on YouTube nothing has approached the impact of Too Many Cooks in the years since. Collider takes a trip down memory lane on the absurdist short’s anniversary.

7. Is Indie TV Ready to be a Thing? - From the web series boom of the early 2010s to the rise of series-specific festivals like SeriesFest and TV-sidebars at major film festivals, it feels like we’ve been trying to will into existence a movement that would do for TV what 90s Sundance did in creating the indie film ecosystem. Two of my favorite cultural commentators, hosts of “The Watch” podcast, discuss the possibility of such a thing in light of the Mark Duplass independently financed series Penelope and Shatter Belt from the writer/director of the cult hit Coherence. For a more nuts and bolts discussion, listen to Duplass on “The Town” podcast.

8. Tribeca Fest To Deepen Relationship with “Creators” - Tribeca Fest has long been a pioneer in embracing formats that end up adopted by the larger film festival ecosystem (interactive, TV, audio, and more). Now word comes that the NYC festival will introduce a “Creator Forum” to its 2025 event. TikTok is already at Cannes, surely an official TikTok Palme d’Or is near!?

9. YouTube Getting “Massive” Upgrade to Comments - VidIQ shares details of some features in beta that will help you ID returning commenters and forge relationships with your most engaged fans.

10. What To Watch in Theaters: Alum Hannah Peterson (East of the River, Champ) sees her Tribeca-winning feature debut hit theaters today! Kate Erbland has a feature on Peterson in Indiewire this week. The inaugural release of NYC curatorial and grant org The Future of Film is Female, NYC fans, please support both Hannah and FOFIFF at the film’s Metrograph screenings.