Vimeo, the big video sharing site, known mostly for its global popularity as the video player of choice for the creative community, is launching today a commercial service for small businesses.

The site, which had not permitted commerical content, is launching Vimeo Pro, an online video platform product which has an annual fee of $199 and provides 50 GB of storage and 250,000 annual streams.

We spoke with Dae Mellencamp, General Manager of Vimeo, a unit of IAC, for this overview of the product. She explains where the new offering is positioned in the marketplace, between free video sites and big enterprise solutions.

She explains that the commerical videos will not be integrated into the Vimeo site as the tool is meant mostly to create videos for customer sites.  Vimeo does not provide integration of video advertising.

Andy Plesser