Vimeo Lands Deal with Mystery Science Theater 3000 for its OnDemand Service - The UpStream

Just recently we've talked about YouTube fighting a losing battle in keeping its top spot as the world's go-to video service. Despite recent platform and service enhancements, Google is still losing to the competition like Hitbox, Twitch and DailyMotion. Another company YouTube needs to look out for is Vimeo, a site that's been rapidly growing over the past two years and is gunning for the lead position in all things video. Vimeo further proved its motive this week, when it acquired the Mystery Science Theater 3000 catalog.

MST3K being picked up by Vimeo is cool for a lot of reasons. First, listeners and readers of our content will now we are proudly partnered with Rifftrax, the new endeavor formed by the creators of MST3K. Knowing that 80 episodes of the crew's previous work will be on display for people both familiar and unfamiliar with the series to see is kind of cool. Next, this finally gives people a legal way to view the content. Until this deal, episodes have been trickled to Netflix and Hulu, or you have to pick them up on iTunes, Google Play or Vudu as you wished.

So, how is this all going down? 80 episodes of MST3K are up on Vimeo right now, but not in the way most video content on Vimeo is viewed. Instead, this collection is behind Vimeo's OnDemand service. For $299.99, you can have unlimited access to all 80 episodes, wherever you want to watch them. If that's not up your budget alley, that's okay. You can rent each episode individually for $2.99 or buy it for $9.99. Even at that $10 price point, I can assure you most of these episodes are worth it, but you can see how you save money by buying them all up in one shot.

Here's where it gets better. In the next year, MST3K will be clearing about another dozen episodes, and those will also be available on the platform. Vimeo says it is working with the show and the movie studios to get rights to all 198 episodes at some point, but have not said where the parties are in the contract negotiations. And for those who are wondering about those new episodes and how it plays into you purchasing all 80 existing for $300, Vimeo said any newly-released content will be included in that bundle, so that's even more value added to the offer.

So I'm pretty excited about all of this, especially that you can now pick up the entire digital collection in one place. Are you excited, too? What's your favorite MST3K episode? Let me know in the comments section.