Big news, friends: today we’re thrilled to announce that Vimeo will be providing a new way for API developers to upload videos, making it speedier and easier than ever before! This new service will use tus, an open and resumable upload protocol.

What is tus?

tus is an open protocol for uploading files over HTTP. Using tus enables resumable uploads, meaning a user does not need to complete their file upload all in one session. And tus is an open source project with an active community: many client and server implementations exist in multiple languages, and there is a Slack channel dedicated to providing user support. Stay up to to date with the latest tus changes by visiting their Github project!

Why is it awesome?

We decided to use tus in our upload stack because the tus protocol standardizes the process of uploading files in a concise and open manner. This standardization will allow API developers to focus more on their application-specific code, and less on the upload process itself.

What are some of the amazing ways this plays out? Developers will be able to use any of tus’s many client implementations in whatever language they develop their application in. Using tus will also enable API developers to test their applications locally. Since Vimeo will be utilizing the same open source implementation of the tus server, API developers can run the server themselves and test their applications against it. This will make troubleshooting potential bugs in application code possible for developers without them having to hit Vimeo’s API.

This is a natural move for us, as Vimeo has always aimed to be an advocate and contributor to the open source community. As such, several brilliant Vimeans jumped in to help bring this update into reality for us — AND we’ve contributed two new features to the tus server implementation as well. We added support for Google Cloud Storage as a datastore and also enabled HTTP hooks for upload events. We believe that using tus will improve our members’ upload experience and provide a standard for uploading files across any platform.

When is it all happening?

We plan on making our tus upload stack available through our API in late 2017. Our current API upload process will be deprecated but not turned off. We highly recommend switching over to tus when it is available! We’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready, so you can start diving in and enjoying even more seamless uploading.