3 ms·

Show HN: Live Streaming Platform with Payments

1 points by zengouu 6y ago

chovyfu 6y ago
why would people pay to watch? and a 45% platform fee? that's highway robbery.
- zengouu 6y ago
  That's a great question and thanks for asking People around the world are paying to watch broadcasts: UFC fights on PPV, online courses for coding, premium sports coaching content etc. so based on that I believe there is a paying audience there. Of course, like everything, that's just a hunch and needs to be validated so your point is valid. Then there is the 45% platform fee. To be honest, at the moment it's a rough calculation based on costs of running a live streaming platform. Financially to make the platform make any sense, the costs it has to cover are following: - Payments with Stripe (or similar) - Live streaming (bandwidth, live encoding, CDN for stream delivery) - Website hosting For reference, Twitch.tv, probably the most widely known streaming platform takes a 50% "platform fee" (from subscription) even though they are owned by Amazon and probably have direct access to Amazon hosting infrastructure. The funny thing about live streaming cost is that the more viewers a stream has, the cheaper it actually is to provide. So when things scale up, price goes down. So in the long run, it would be possible to lower the platform fee. But in general, I agree with you that the costs have to come down. That could mean things like lower pricing to bigger streamers etc.
02020202 6y ago
i was working on something similar to dlive/youtube/twitch. live video stream+chat+donations. nothing complicated really...until you have to handle video transcoding with ffmepg and then you realize you have to pay for proper hardware(with hw codec support) and suddenly the live video lag/delay grows because you have to encode on the fly for different qualities and codecs and so on so in the end i shelved the idea. anyway, ppv is nothing new but i doubt it will take off. the donation based model is simply the norm these days, especially with "superchats" and people make good money this way so i doubt audiences will want to move to ppv platforms. good luck though.

1 points by zengouu 6y ago

chovyfu 6y ago

why would people pay to watch? and a 45% platform fee? that's highway robbery.

zengouu 6y ago
That's a great question and thanks for asking People around the world are paying to watch broadcasts: UFC fights on PPV, online courses for coding, premium sports coaching content etc. so based on that I believe there is a paying audience there. Of course, like everything, that's just a hunch and needs to be validated so your point is valid. Then there is the 45% platform fee. To be honest, at the moment it's a rough calculation based on costs of running a live streaming platform. Financially to make the platform make any sense, the costs it has to cover are following: - Payments with Stripe (or similar) - Live streaming (bandwidth, live encoding, CDN for stream delivery) - Website hosting For reference, Twitch.tv, probably the most widely known streaming platform takes a 50% "platform fee" (from subscription) even though they are owned by Amazon and probably have direct access to Amazon hosting infrastructure. The funny thing about live streaming cost is that the more viewers a stream has, the cheaper it actually is to provide. So when things scale up, price goes down. So in the long run, it would be possible to lower the platform fee. But in general, I agree with you that the costs have to come down. That could mean things like lower pricing to bigger streamers etc.

02020202 6y ago

i was working on something similar to dlive/youtube/twitch. live video stream+chat+donations. nothing complicated really...until you have to handle video transcoding with ffmepg and then you realize you have to pay for proper hardware(with hw codec support) and suddenly the live video lag/delay grows because you have to encode on the fly for different qualities and codecs and so on so in the end i shelved the idea. anyway, ppv is nothing new but i doubt it will take off. the donation based model is simply the norm these days, especially with "superchats" and people make good money this way so i doubt audiences will want to move to ppv platforms. good luck though.