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How do you fund this? I got semi-far with some friends on building a project similar to this, however, we stopped halfway through because we realized that video
by pjanoman 6y ago
How do you fund this? I got semi-far with some friends on building a project similar to this, however, we stopped halfway through because we realized that video hosting quickly becomes quite expensive; without a monetization plan, there'd be no way we could stay afloat. Looks great!
- mmcclure 6y agoNot OP, but video nerd. I haven't actually used the product yet, but my guess is they're using WebRTC, which can be run (almost) completely as a peer-to-peer mesh network for small enough groups. Where video can start getting really expensive is, as you said, when you're centrally hosting/processing/streaming large amounts of it. For this use-case there's a good chance they don't end up touching the video streams themselves at all, which is really cool.
- andrewicarlson 6y ago@mmcclure is right. This uses WebRTC and is currently in peer mode. As soon as I start allowing more than 4 people per room that might cause some performance issues, I’ll need to monitor that. As it stands now there is a hard cost, but it isn’t prohibitive yet.
- reitzensteinm 6y agoI'm bootstrapping a similar project, video chat but with various games. At cloud pricing you'll be paying $100/TB, but there are plenty of alternative providers that can give you great deals. Hetzner for instance charges $1/TB for their VPS solution. You can also cut back on video detail depending on the project - you don't need to send 720p streams for something a bit more experimental or with other things happening. Combined that's low enough that ads should easily cover the bandwidth.