Insanely low API limit?

If you think it's bad now, you should've tried it when the standard allocation was 10,000 calls! (Should also check with your account rep b/c you should be able to get 100,000 these days given your database size.)

Really, Vidyard should've known better than to lean on the REST API (let alone to use the API without hard-capping their own daily consumption and being explicit about the dangers). The API has never been suited for one-by-one calls in response to end user activity, and video tracking is particularly gnarly in this regard... if you're logging plays, pauses, and finishes you've got crazy multipliers, and it can get out of hand even using the (de facto unlimited) Munchkin API!

Of course we know they were thinking, "Enterprise product = enterprise capacity" but not testing isn't right. We vet products by asking, "How do you deal with the API limitations?" If they're dumbfounded, or if they don't have an answer that's already baked into the product settings, that's a bad sign; if the answer is, "You set a daily limit in this dialog box," that's at least a better sign.

The silver lining, and take this with the requisite irony, is that if you were allowed 1MM calls/day like you probably have with SFDC, the back end couldn't handle the traffic. I think that's where the main problem is and that some reengineering is necessary (and, one hopes, pending).  While you can buy more API calls if you have the $ (you probably can't wrangle your rep above 100K bundled)  that doesn't mean performance will be up to your expectations, because the whole resource-governor-time-slice stuff you get with SFDC isn't there yet.

Another thing to think about is what you might call the "API privatization" movement -- some major players have realized that supporting 3rd-party integrations isn't as profitable as, well, owning the integrations (at which point they're not really integrations!). Witness Salesforce swallowing MuleSoft and in turn dataloader.io, etc.   Perhaps there will be a similar offering that, while not "open" in the sense of creating an 3rd-party ecosystem, allows for this kind of scale.