Today, just over a month later, Vimeo is announcing that creators have uploaded hundreds of paid videos, and viewers have made “thousands” of purchases. Not too specific, but it looks like there’s at least some significant buzz over Vimeo’s newest project. With their VOD service off and running, Vimeo is now looking to make all the content easier to discover.

To that end, Vimeo has launched a redesigned On Demand homepage.

“Introducing: the new Vimeo On Demand home page, which puts the focus on the creative films and series distributed using the new platform. Looking for something to watch tonight? Boom. Check out “Vimeo Selects” for titles we find interesting, or browse the entire On Demand catalog by genre. You can even keep track of all your On Demand purchases in “My On Demand,” right on this page. Because it’s hard to remember them all when you’ve bought hundreds of them, right? RIGHT!?” says Vimeo’s Blake Whitman.

The dive in paid videos began back in September of last year, when Vimeo introduced their Creator Services platform. The first service unveiled was the “tip jar,” which allowed viewers to leave tips for video creators. Vimeo promises that there are more improvements left to be made to their new VOD platform.

Have you paid to stream anything using Vimeo yet?

A couple of months later in November, Vimeo took a baby step toward that with a pay-to-view service complete with six movies released to their Vimeo Movies site.

Today, Vimeo is launching the full video on demand service that will let video makers sell their work on the site. It’s pay-to-view, put squarely in the hands of the creators.

“We’re creators ourselves, and we know how hard it can be to get your work out there and connect with an audience. Since we founded Vimeo in 2004, we’ve been dreaming of a world where more and more creators can support themselves with their work alone. Today we’re proud to be taking a big step in that direction, and there are many more exciting steps to come,” says Vimeo.

Vimeo On Demand features customizable viewing options that let creators decide exactly how much to charge for their video, the viewing period (how long it can be viewed after purchase), and even where it can be viewed (regional limiting). Creators can also customize their Vimeo On Demand pages and sell the films on their own sites, using Vimeo’s framework.

And the split is a flat 90/10. Creators keep 90% of the revenue generated by the views of their videos. Which, to a lot of artists, is a more than fair split.

To get started with Vimeo’s new pay-to-view service, you must be a Vimeo PRO member.

Adding to the already available selection of musical accompaniments for your videos, you can now add new “Looks” to your videos. Looks are described as “high quality, stylistic visual effects” and Vimeo is starting off by offerring over 500 of them.

Vimeo has partnered with visual enhancement platform Vivoom to bring you the new Looks.

Vimeo notes that the “recommended” offerings will be show an “optimal set of creative choices based on technical analysis of the user’s video and social data,” meaning that it will learn about you the more you use it. Hopefully, that will make the recommendations actually useful when you’re deciding how to enhance your videos.

“By adding Looks, Vimeo continues to provide the tools that help people easily make better videos,” said Vimeo CEO, Kerry Trainor. “Nearly every minute you see on TV or in movies has been visually enhanced. Everyone wants the same quality as the pros, but it’s out of reach for most people. Our aim is to make these types of high quality visual effects easy and accessible to everyone.”

To refer to Instagram is to sell the new features short, most likely. At first, it does feel a lot like simple filters but the sheer breadth and depth of the options make Looks a powerful new tool to Vimeo-using filmmakers.

You can browse (and try out) all the new Looks today. It will be completely free to play around with for 90 days, after which things will begin to cost money. Many of the Looks show a $0.99 price tag, which is currently crossed out and labelled as FREE. For now.

Vimeo says that it’s a testament to their “unflinching belief in the integrity of visual storytelling,” because “one cannot ignore the naked, the violent, and the swearing when striving to capture the breadth of the human condition.” Amen to that.

But not all video ares suitable for all audiences, even if they do accurately depict the human condition. With that in mind, Vimeo is introducing new content ratings.

Starting today, you’ll see a new badge next to the title/artist info on all videos on the site. It will either read “mature,” “all audiences,” or “not yet rated.”

“This means we’ll ask creators to tell us if there’s nudity, violence, or illegal substances (e.g., plutonium) in their videos, which can still be uploaded to Vimeo as long as they comply with our Guidelines. For those who never upload videos with mature content, it’s easy to mark everything as appropriate for all audiences in your global video settings,” says Vimeo.

YouTube, for instance, has featured warnings on some videos that they have been restricted due to age guidelines and that they may contain mature content. Vimeo, who has always been known for allowing a little more artistic freedom should we say, isn’t limiting any of that. They’re just giving people an additional heads-up.

“It’s that time of year when a company’s thoughts turn to itself. Which is frankly what a company is always thinking about, because you pretty much have to if you don’t want the company to flounder or go off the rails or insert your favorite catastrophe cliché here. And now that we’ve taken a good hard look at Vimeo, we’re left with two mutually inclusive thoughts: 1. Dang, there are a lot more homo sapiens here than last year. 2. Wow, we sure accomplished a lot in 2012,” says Vimeo’s Chris Diken.

Vimeo says that they now have over 14 million members, with over 5 million of them joining this year. That means that 37% of all Vimeo members are relatively new members.

Vimeo hosts over 50 million videos, as that milestone was hit back in September. Videos uploaded this year total over 3.2 petabytes of data with 1.4 petabytes transcoded. Vimeo says that 200+ petabytes were played in 2012.

And in total visits to the site, Vimeo hit 675 million.

If you’re looking for some context to those numbers, YouTube boasts over 800 million unique visits every month. Last year, YouTube said they hosted over a trillion views.

Vimeo has had a busy year. They kicked it off with a significant site redesign back in January. A couple of months ago, they launched their new set of creator tools which included a Tip Jar for videomakers. They also kicked off their new pay-to-view product which they will continue to expand in 2013. Just recently, Vimeo shipped a major update to their iOS app and finally landed on the Xbox 360.

The video screen on the new Vimeo for Xbox app included descriptions, credits, and related videos. Logged-in users can also like and share videos as well as follow users from inside the app.

Oh yeah, and Vimeo HD videos are in HD. Which is one of the main reason you would want a Vimeo app on your console – so good on you Vimeo.

Here are some of the other cool things about Vimeo’s new Xbox 360 app, according to Vimeo:

• Vimeo in HD on your giant TV: You know, the way you watch everything else.
• Continuous play: Turn on your feed, your Watch Later queue, or an Album of your favorites and then wonder where three hours went. Or create a party Album to play in the background during your next shindig.
• Voice and gesture controls with Kinect for Xbox 360: Just tell your Xbox what you want, like it’s your buddy. Maybe soon you’ll be able to control Vimeo with your MIND.*
• Connect your Xbox LIVE account to Vimeo: See your Xbox LIVE friends’ activity and stay logged into Vimeo whenever you’re on Xbox LIVE.

For Xbox users, their video streaming options are expanding rapidly. They now have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vimeo, and more at their fingertips.

Late last month, Vimeo launched an totally redesigned iPhone app that was faster as brought better navigation and background video uploading.

“The new app is simply the best way to watch, create and share Vimeo videos on the go. We redesigned it to be smarter and more intuitive so you can do what you want, when you want, really easily. You can take your feed on a road trip (just not while you’re driving), relax in the park with your Watch Later queue, or catch a Staff Pick or a friend’s video while in line for lunch. When the lunch line explodes into spontaneous song and dance, as it often does, record it and upload it right from the app. You can even watch more videos while it uploads,” says Vimeo.

Uploading has gotten a lot faster with this update, as users can let their videos upload in background while watching other videos or adding information to the upload.

On the browsing side, there’s a new Feed view and a tab-based design that replaces the old grid-style navigation. This makes it much easier to find videos via an Explore tab, or watch videos from your feed, “watch later” queue, or your “likes.” Sharing has also improved, as users can now natively share videos they like via Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Of course, Vimeo says that everything is now “super fast.”

Check out the not-creepy-at-all promotional video Vimeo made for their new iPhone app below:

Recently, Vimeo launched an all-new Creator Services Suite which allowed video creators to add a tip jar to their videos. Also on the horizon over at Vimeo: Pay-to-view videos.

At that time, Vimeo also announced a brand new pay-to-view service to allow video creators to charge a set fee for access to their content. They were tight-lipped about many of the details, but said it would be coming soon.

Today, they are previewing that pay-to-view service by releasing 6 new films to the newly-created site, Vimeo Movies.

Starting today, Vimeo users can pay between $5 and $9 to stream the films. Here’s what they are offering:

Sunny – Level 1 injects a positive mood into the ski season — giving a dose of light therapy to dark northern landscapes of Scandinavia, Alaska, Japan and British Columbia.

Further – Award winning producers Teton Gravity Research are pleased to announce Further, the second installment in the Jeremy Jones snowboard movie trilogy, Deeper, Further, Higher, presented by O’Neill.

Shut Up and Play the Hits – documents a once in a life time performance and an intimate portrait of James Murphy as he navigates the end of LCD Soundsystem.

Beauty is Embarrassing – a funny, irreverent, joyful and inspiring documentary featuring the life and current times of one of America’s most important artists, Wayne White.

We are Legion – The Story of the Hacktivists, takes us inside the complex culture and history of Anonymous. The film explores early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater, and then moves to Anonymous’ own raucous and unruly beginnings on the website 4Chan.

Son of the Clouds – This compelling documentary brings to light the political and human rights issues facing the people of the Western Sahara and the responsibility of Western powers in the effort to restore peace to the region.

Once you purchase a film, it will be available to stream on any compatible device.

“Our mission is to support totally original video and the people who create it, which means providing more than a home. It means creating an environment where creators can access the resources to make their next film, and the one after that. Our new pay-to-view service enables creators to upload and distribute work that they depend on for their livelihood, all with easy setup and affordable rates. In turn, our community gets access to amazing work from the world’s leading filmmakers,” says Vimeo.

Of course, Vimeo is not only monetizing in order to help artists, but to help their bottom line. The mostly ad-free service generates most of its revenue from selling pro services to both users and creators. Vimeo is currently taking a 15% cut of any contributions made to videos’ tips jars. The pay-to-view service is still in beta, and Vimeo says they will open it up to more video creators in 2013.

“Today, we’re taking one of the most important steps in our evolution as a service, a company, and a community. We’re proud to introduce Vimeo Creator Services, our new suite of simple, powerful tools to help creators make more money for doing what they do best: entertaining us, engaging us, baffling and outright dazzling us with amazing work,” said Vimeo’s Blake Whitman.

The first product on the Creator Services platform is Tip Jar, which allows viewers to make contributions to video makers to the tune of $1-500. If a video maker has activated Tip Jar for their videos, users will see a “Tip the video” button right below the video player.

And Tip Jar is only the beginning of the monetization options coming to Vimeo. Coming next year is a new Pay-to-view service which will allow video makers to charge viewers to watch their content.

“In the coming months, we are incredibly excited to introduce our first pay-to-view service, giving video creators of all types flexible tools to charge for access to your videos, with no coding required. We’re not saying too much at the moment, but we can promise you’re going to like it,” says Vimeo.

Of course, Tip Jar isn’t designed to only help video creators. Vimeo will take a 15% cut on all tips made on the site.

Microsoft has released Windows Essential 2012 for both Windows 8 and Windows 7. While you can grab the software now for Windows 7 or the customer preview of Windows 8, it will also ship with the full retail version of Windows 8 coming out on October 26. Before you go download the new software, you should take a look at all the improvements Microsoft has made.

Windows Movie Maker has always been kind of like a stepping stone into more advanced video creation software. It’s always been pretty simplistic and doesn’t allow for all the fancy tricks that software from Adobe or Sony allows. Unfortunately, that remains the case with the new version of Windows Movie Maker. It’s still best for quick editing of family videos, not for large projects with lots of post-processing.

Despite its simplistic nature, Microsoft has added a couple of great new features to Windows Movie Maker. The most helpful is the addition of anti-shake feature. They use the example of a mountain biker with a camera strapped to his helmet. The software will now be able to turn the bumpy video into something much smoother.

For those who like adding music to your videos, Microsoft has a new feature that will help users avoid the YouTube censors that block songs over copyright. They have partnered with AudioMicro, Free Music Archive and Vimeo Music Store to help users find the right music that won’t be stripped once its published on the Web.

Speaking of music, Microsoft has added waveform visualizations to both the music and the video’s audio in WMM. This helps users make sure the music will never interfere with the video’s audio and vice versa. Users can also strip their narration from the video and add it as an audio file so that the two are separate.

On a final audio note, they have added software that lets you emphasize audio streams. This allows you to make sure the music is always heard over the other audio in the video vying for the viewer’s attention.

Text has always been a mainstay of videos made with WMM. To make the text easier to read, users can now add dark outlines around the text to highlight it against backgrounds.

In what may be the biggest news for WMM, the software will now publish videos in h.264 by default. It’s quickly becoming the standard and it’s nice to see Microsoft embracing standards. Now if only we could convince them to publish videos in .mkv instead of .mov or .wmv.

Unlike WMM, Microsoft is only adding one new feature to Photo Gallery. It’s called Auto Collage and it does what it sounds like. The software takes seven or more of your photos and creates a collage based on them.

Finally, Microsoft announced a partnership with Vimeo. Users can now publish their videos straight to Vimeo from Windows Movie Maker or Photo Gallery. The Vimeo options are built into the software so it doesn’t even require you to open a browser during the process.

If you want to try out the new Windows Movie Maker or Photo Gallery, it’s part of Windows Essential 2012. It’s a free download from Microsoft and includes other software like the new Outlook 2012 and SkyDrive.