4 ms·

* What do you say are the biggest challenges? * What's the oddest problem you have had to solve while building/operating this?

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Surprisingly enough: * Politics within the organization * Interfacing with legacy broadcast/video library systems (f* you Grass Valley, and your abomination of a video asset management system) Serving video online is fairly straightforward, although it wasn't always. We've come a long way from RTMP and progressive HTTP downloads. With HLS, MPEG-DASH, etc, you're still moving the same bits, but you have a much better end user experience. Netflix has original renditions for all of its content in S3, which they convert into multiple renditions based on bitrate and other video metadata, and their player then intelligently switches based on available bandwidth. Its (mostly) that easy, unless you're the White House or SpaceX streaming to millions of people at once. That's still a bit tricky, and you usually call Akamai, Limelight, or Encoding.com to solve that. If I had to do it all over again, I'd create a small startup team (no more than 10-15 people) to create a platform that lets you white label so anyone could build their own Netflix with their own content (or licensed content) and iterate ruthlessly. Don't partner on storage or CDN, just create modules that let you plug n play based on the rates you can get (API libraries all the way down). Setup a partnership department to hook customers up with hardware vendors (Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, those folks). Keep in the front of your mind that tech is commodity but relationships are what's going to put you in tens of millions of homes. I left because no one realized how quickly other parties in the space (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc) were innovating. We'd spend months in the weeds, with little momentum on key features. In 5-10 years, broadcast is completely dead, its airspace auctioned off to cellular providers. This does not get through to traditional broadcast folks.
- newman314 11y ago
  Thanks for the insight.
- slederer 11y ago
  Nice insights! Interesting fact on your approach: at bitmovin we do exactly that, we've our bitcodin.com encoding service and our bitdash players (www.dash-player.com), which can plug into any cloud storage, CDN, wtc., we've quite a lot interfaces and tutorials for that. We see us as kind of Stripe for video.
- silverbax88 11y ago
  I'm working on something in this space. Can you pass along your contact info? I'd love to pick your brain a bit. If you'd prefer, you can contact me at mshockley@neptunemediagroup.com

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Surprisingly enough: * Politics within the organization * Interfacing with legacy broadcast/video library systems (f* you Grass Valley, and your abomination of a video asset management system) Serving video online is fairly straightforward, although it wasn't always. We've come a long way from RTMP and progressive HTTP downloads. With HLS, MPEG-DASH, etc, you're still moving the same bits, but you have a much better end user experience. Netflix has original renditions for all of its content in S3, which they convert into multiple renditions based on bitrate and other video metadata, and their player then intelligently switches based on available bandwidth. Its (mostly) that easy, unless you're the White House or SpaceX streaming to millions of people at once. That's still a bit tricky, and you usually call Akamai, Limelight, or Encoding.com to solve that. If I had to do it all over again, I'd create a small startup team (no more than 10-15 people) to create a platform that lets you white label so anyone could build their own Netflix with their own content (or licensed content) and iterate ruthlessly. Don't partner on storage or CDN, just create modules that let you plug n play based on the rates you can get (API libraries all the way down). Setup a partnership department to hook customers up with hardware vendors (Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, those folks). Keep in the front of your mind that tech is commodity but relationships are what's going to put you in tens of millions of homes. I left because no one realized how quickly other parties in the space (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc) were innovating. We'd spend months in the weeds, with little momentum on key features. In 5-10 years, broadcast is completely dead, its airspace auctioned off to cellular providers. This does not get through to traditional broadcast folks.

newman314 11y ago
Thanks for the insight.
slederer 11y ago
Nice insights! Interesting fact on your approach: at bitmovin we do exactly that, we've our bitcodin.com encoding service and our bitdash players (www.dash-player.com), which can plug into any cloud storage, CDN, wtc., we've quite a lot interfaces and tutorials for that. We see us as kind of Stripe for video.
silverbax88 11y ago
I'm working on something in this space. Can you pass along your contact info? I'd love to pick your brain a bit. If you'd prefer, you can contact me at mshockley@neptunemediagroup.com