VPAL — Beta with Augustine Institute
Stop being held hostage by your video provider.
VPAL is the Video Provider Abstraction Layer. It sits between your applications and your video infrastructure, so you can switch between providers, or run multiple providers simultaneously, without rewriting your code.
The catalyst.
Bending Spoons acquired both Vimeo ($1.38B, closed November 2025) and Brightcove ($233M, closed March 2025), consolidating two of the largest enterprise video platforms under a single owner with a track record of aggressive cost cutting.
Over 1,000 Vimeo employees were laid off in January 2026, including the entire video engineering team. Enterprise customers face genuine uncertainty about platform continuity, support quality, and innovation roadmaps.
VPAL is our structured response. Not a video platform — infrastructure middleware that insulates your business logic from provider-level changes, migrations, or failures.
How VPAL works
Capabilities
Designed to give engineering leaders optionality. Built to be boring infrastructure that just works.
Stable interface contract
One canonical API for upload, transcode, player, analytics, billing. Whichever provider sits behind it, your code stays the same.
Multi-provider support
Vimeo, Brightcove, Mux, Cloudflare Stream, Bunny. Run one or several in parallel. Migrate gradually, A/B test pricing, hedge against vendor risk.
Automated migration tools
Content IDs, metadata, entitlements, analytics history, billing — ported with structured tooling, not project-by-project hand work.
Observability
Per-provider latency, error rate, cost per asset. Compare providers on your real workload, not vendor decks.
Cost optimisation
Route hot content to cost-optimised CDNs, archive cold content cheaply, switch providers when pricing changes — without touching application code.
60% faster migrations
Compared to ground-up re-integration, VPAL-powered migrations complete in weeks not months.
Lighthouse client
Augustine Institute — Formed platform
Augustine Institute operates Formed, a subscription streaming platform for Catholic educational content originally built by Impekable on Vimeo OTT with Core. The Bending Spoons acquisition created an immediate concern about platform continuity. Augustine Institute is VPAL's lighthouse: a motivated first customer and an ideal validation environment.
- Faster migrations vs re-integration
- 60%+
- Code reuse across clients
- 50%+
- Licensing + support model
- Recurring
Where VPAL fits
Anywhere a business depends on a single video provider for revenue or operations.