Anjali Sud's BIG plans for Vimeo

'I am most excited about a new video production solution for large organisations -- think Fortune 500 companies -- that have distributed teams, many of which are based in India.'

IMAGE: Anjali Sud (in pink) with her team after Vimeo listed on Nasdaq. Photograph: Kind courtesy Anjali Sud/Twitter

"We at Vmeo have shifted away from being an entertainment and viewing destination and really think of ourselves as much more of a technology and software solution," Anjali Sud, the 37-year-old CEO of Vimeo, tells Rediff.com US Contributor Abhijit Masih.

Part I: How Anjali Sud made it Big at Vimeo

You mentioned Bengaluru being your next biggest office outside US, so what are the current activities being employed by Vimeo to increase the subscription base in India?

We are investing a very robust product road map and you are going to see a bunch of new tools and a couple that I would like to highlight for you -- one is that we enable other content companies to stream and create their own Netflix like subscription and there we do a lot of work to make sure that our product is localized and work globally.

But the one that I am most excited about is a new video production solution for large organisations -- think Fortune 500 companies -- that have distributed teams, many of which are based in India.

Using this tool any employee can record their screen, do a video walk-through asynchronously and send that privately to their team.

It is an alternate to that Zoom meeting. Everyone is going through Zoom fatigue right now.

With this tool you don't have to have a meeting.

Just record and talk in to your screen, do a walk-through or a demo and send it out.

It ends up saving enormous amount of time and energy, but it also makes you feel connected cause you are looking at some one's face and hearing them talk and getting all the benefits of being there in person.

That's a tool that we did not have a year ago, but see a lot of traction in and it is helping distributed teams to be more connected, more collaborative and more efficient.

A majority of users in India consume content in local languages like Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu etc. How significant is the regional market and what is the strategy?

So, we are not creating content ourselves. We are building the tools for enabling others to create the content.

It is absolutely clear to us that a lot of content creators watch regional content.

A lot of things that we are building are in service of helping the brands that are not Netflix and that do not have billion dollar budgets.

We want to reach out to someone like a yoga instructor or a teacher, live streaming your classes and charging for those classes.

Or that you are a social media influencer and instead of getting paid through advertising on your content, you want to start directly charging for some of your content.

We are trying to offer the tools to make that possible.

This is going to enable the smaller, perhaps local media companies and individual content creators to actually be able create their own regional content, put their branding on it, distribute it and monetise it.

Vimeo was for sometime and Tik Tok is currently banned in India. How do you safeguard from such governmental hurdles and is there a screening process for the content that goes on to the Vimeo platform?

This is one of the challenges of being an open UGC (User Generated Content) platform.

First and foremost, we at Vmeo have shifted away from being an entertainment and viewing destination and really think of ourselves as much more of a technology and software solution.

If you are Facebook, YouTube or Tik Tok, your whole business is driving eye balls and views and then your algorithms are optimizing for that number and you can get in to issues for content.

We don't have that, we make no money from advertising and we are not interested or trying to get views on Vimeo.

We are just trying to help you get your content on to Facebook, onto YouTube and on to Tik Tok.

So that shift in our strategy over the last few years has really changed how we sit in the eco-system and has made the risk for us much less.

That being said, we still do allow people to allow content on Vimeo and we take our responsibility very seriously to ensure that content is safe and abides by our guidelines.

We have our own dedicated team, we partner with third parties and have data and algorithms.

We refresh our guidelines constantly with the changing times and issues.

Like the issues of misinformation regarding vaccination and election fraud.

Content that is clearly misinformation and that causes real world harm.

That is an example, that we have gone much stronger in removing that content from the platform.

We continue to improve and invest in this area but because we are serving businesses and their content and not trying to drive viewers on Vimeo, it reduces the kinds of issues that you might see on other platforms.