Will Vimeo be able to crack the live streaming market?

Facebook has done it, so has Instagram — it's the most interactive video concept that exists right now. Now Vimeo, the popular video hosting website, is getting on board with the live streaming trend with its acquisition of Livestream and the launch of Vimeo Live.Compared to the easily-accessible live streaming platforms we can use on social media, Vimeo is taking a different route, as Vimeo Live’s 1080p streaming is "not a consumer-level product" and is going to cost £70 a month.A high-end streaming service.... how well will this work? Have we learned nothing from the high-end, overhyped music streaming service Tidal, which made a grand entrance and then consequently crashed and burned?What Vimeo will offer that is different from the rest is adaptive streaming, providing high quality across all devices, regardless of bandwidth. It’s going to be suitable for established filmmakers, artists and businesses, and will offer Business and Custom packages at the price of £280 and £750, giving options such as simultaneous events streaming and a dedicated account manager.It's hard to know how Vimeo Live will be received. The company will have to produce a rather spectacular service to warrant that price tag and, to make it even harder, they are entering an already saturated market. Live streaming is definitely not brand new — we've seen it in many forms, including Periscope (whatever happened to that?) and then the historic Justin.TV, which then became Twitch.Twitch, which will be one of many lower-cost competitors, has been increasingly successful over the past few years and is now a platform visited by 10 million people a day. It hosts the streams of international tournaments for multiplayer games such as CS:GO and League of Legends, and broadcasts everything from art and music to people filming themselves cooking.In 2016, there were more than 2.2 million unique streamers on the Twitch platform. Some very memorable moments have emerged; one being when the infamous Bob Ross was broadcast in 2015, pulling in 5.2 million viewers, with his catch phrases like "we don’t make mistakes – only happy little accidents" being donned by the masses.There are many communities that have emerged from successes like this on the Twitch platform. Some streamers have enough of a following and receive enough donations to make it their day job. The interactivity is exciting and shows that live streaming can not only provide entertainment but it can raise millions of pounds for charity. In 2016 Twitch raised an impressive $25.3 million dollars — will Vimeo Live be able to do something similar?Vimeo has made a lot of headlines after its announcement, so there’s certainly a lot of promise. It will become more and more important for tech-savvy content creators, gamers and musicians to take on this particular medium — a whole layer of communication and potential audience reach is missed without it, so Vimeo is certainly heading in the right direction. We can probably learn a thing or two from it all so perhaps you'll see us on the homepage of streaming platforms in the not so distant future!