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As I do some middlingly professional-ish video livestreaming--I run a three/four camera show most Fridays for the Boston fighting game scene, we're newish to st

As I do some middlingly professional-ish video livestreaming--I run a three/four camera show most Fridays for the Boston fighting game scene, we're newish to streaming but it's one of the biggest locals in the country--it was natural to look into the costs of self-hosted streaming. They're pretty prohibitive. Data is either expensive (AWS) or bandwidth-constrained (DigitalOcean etc.). Running from local is likewise not a reasonable option, either because of bottlenecked uploads (yo, Comcast) or just because it's simply unsafe to rely on something like a consumer connection, even if it's FiOS, to upload a show. I don't have a good solution to this, unfortunately. The biggest benefit to Twitch is that it becomes possible for fifty or five hundred people to find you; the algorithm can be your friend if you're lucky or good. The second-biggest benefit to Twitch is that if fifty or five hundred people come by, your stream is not going to melt.

Rjevski 8y ago
Has anyone considered hosts like OVH/SoYouStart? They have unmetered bandwidth and are quite affordable, and can be even cheaper on Kimsufi if you're willing to compromise on the SLA. Here are servers for around 40$/month with 250Mbps with unmetered traffic: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/en/essential-servers/ Kimsufi is even cheaper with 100Mbps unmetered starting at around 5$: http://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml http://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml
- eropple 8y ago
  Of course; it'd be pretty shortsighted not to, yeah? Setting aside OVH/SoYouStart's generally kinda crap support (and maybe it's just that I do devops professionally but even for my own stuff I expect some support, not emoji shrugs and a lack of English), "unmetered bandwidth" doesn't come with a wide enough pipe. 250Mbps is 40 users at 6Mbps/user, assuming nearly perfect bandwidth usage. One of my weekly streams hits 20-25 without us having advertised yet; these are alpha tests/pre-production streams. We should hit 50-60 when we go for-realsies live, if not more. The next step, then, is to build your own star topology to stream to users. And your own load balancing. All to, uh, not make money on it and to, uh, not have as good of an experience either for the viewer or for the creator as you do when using Twitch or Mixer or YouTube (I don't care how ~~fierce~~ your Twitter game is, a Twitch notification is gonna get you further than the hot tweets). Companies are willing to burn a lot of money and make you the beneficiary. So, right now, I do, and I tend to think even HN types are best off doing likewise.

Rjevski 8y ago

Has anyone considered hosts like OVH/SoYouStart? They have unmetered bandwidth and are quite affordable, and can be even cheaper on Kimsufi if you're willing to compromise on the SLA. Here are servers for around 40$/month with 250Mbps with unmetered traffic: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/en/essential-servers/ Kimsufi is even cheaper with 100Mbps unmetered starting at around 5$: http://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml http://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml

eropple 8y ago
Of course; it'd be pretty shortsighted not to, yeah? Setting aside OVH/SoYouStart's generally kinda crap support (and maybe it's just that I do devops professionally but even for my own stuff I expect some support, not emoji shrugs and a lack of English), "unmetered bandwidth" doesn't come with a wide enough pipe. 250Mbps is 40 users at 6Mbps/user, assuming nearly perfect bandwidth usage. One of my weekly streams hits 20-25 without us having advertised yet; these are alpha tests/pre-production streams. We should hit 50-60 when we go for-realsies live, if not more. The next step, then, is to build your own star topology to stream to users. And your own load balancing. All to, uh, not make money on it and to, uh, not have as good of an experience either for the viewer or for the creator as you do when using Twitch or Mixer or YouTube (I don't care how ~~fierce~~ your Twitter game is, a Twitch notification is gonna get you further than the hot tweets). Companies are willing to burn a lot of money and make you the beneficiary. So, right now, I do, and I tend to think even HN types are best off doing likewise.