5 ms·

There is no practical way to answer this because there isn't enough information. At what scale? (Netflix or a small conference with 1000 users streaming?) Do

There is no practical way to answer this because there isn't enough information. At what scale? (Netflix or a small conference with 1000 users streaming?) Do you have expertise? (Are you a kubernetes/nixos guru with extensive colocation administration experience or do you want Cloudflare Stream ease of use?) The closest thing to an answer for the MOST economic and scalable way assumes a lot of devops capability: be your own CDN.

technobabbler 5y ago
It's unlikely a single devops person or team can scale cheaply. The big CDNs have HUGE economies of scale (read: peering agreements) that make them much, much cheaper than trying to run your own edge network. Hell, even if put your video on an established peer to peer network (similar to bittorrent streaming), the support nightmares would probably cost more than just putting it on an already established CDN. There is really no reason to self-host videos these days. They are write-once (or very rarely), invalidated very rarely, and can be trivially cached everywhere, sort of a best-case scenario for big CDNs. Even if you didn't have to touch a single line of code, trying to reestablish just the business deals yourself across many countries and data interconnects would be ridiculously expensive.
iainctduncan 5y ago
good point, will edit (edit: nope, too late to edit!). I'm talking tiny company that does not have a tech team, but is paying an all-in PaaS license for content delivery, with features I don't think they need. Looking to serve thousands, but not hundreds of thousands.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Can you say which PaaS they are using? It's hard to believe any modern PaaS doesn't have video delivery included as an option of some sort. FYI we use Vimeo to serve about a million views a month, for $20/mo. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    I can't recall, I just got the financials, and what they figured they had to charge per seat seemed very high to me. But it wasn't a video PaaS, it was a whole learning management system PaaS, so the video (the part they really need) is coming with an overall expensive package. LMS's are a good racket! lol. I implemented one years ago for a company doing corporate training (had to replace their flash system, ouch!) and it just wasn't that much work to build something in house that competed with the overpriced LMS PaaS's out there for their particular needs. My perception is people are paying a ton for all the feature bloat, and often using like 20% of it.
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Hah! As soon as you posted this, my first thought was, "I bet they're getting overcharged by some shitty LMS". A lot of those companies resell video hosting for an insane markup. Glad you're trying to find them a better deal. If you need to be able to charge PPV or per month or whatever, Vimeo also offers a billable solution: https://vimeo.com/ott/pricing https://vimeo.com/ott/pricing (OTT is apparently "over-the-top", as in PPV that bypasses cable/satellite/etc... according to wikipedia. Must be a cable-era term.) There are a bunch of other providers in this space... here is one list by a company: https://www.dacast.com/blog/how-does-white-label-video-streaming-work/#anchor_4 https://www.dacast.com/blog/how-does-white-label-video-strea... Or you might be able to API-integrate Cloudflare Stream (or a similarly low-level CDN offering) with the LMS system directly, if they offer such interconnects. My guess is that ease of use would probably get you a better ROI than strong piracy protections in this case and it's probably not worth it to go for DRM or rental models? IMHO only.

technobabbler 5y ago

It's unlikely a single devops person or team can scale cheaply. The big CDNs have HUGE economies of scale (read: peering agreements) that make them much, much cheaper than trying to run your own edge network. Hell, even if put your video on an established peer to peer network (similar to bittorrent streaming), the support nightmares would probably cost more than just putting it on an already established CDN. There is really no reason to self-host videos these days. They are write-once (or very rarely), invalidated very rarely, and can be trivially cached everywhere, sort of a best-case scenario for big CDNs. Even if you didn't have to touch a single line of code, trying to reestablish just the business deals yourself across many countries and data interconnects would be ridiculously expensive.

iainctduncan 5y ago

good point, will edit (edit: nope, too late to edit!). I'm talking tiny company that does not have a tech team, but is paying an all-in PaaS license for content delivery, with features I don't think they need. Looking to serve thousands, but not hundreds of thousands.

technobabbler 5y ago
Can you say which PaaS they are using? It's hard to believe any modern PaaS doesn't have video delivery included as an option of some sort. FYI we use Vimeo to serve about a million views a month, for $20/mo. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  I can't recall, I just got the financials, and what they figured they had to charge per seat seemed very high to me. But it wasn't a video PaaS, it was a whole learning management system PaaS, so the video (the part they really need) is coming with an overall expensive package. LMS's are a good racket! lol. I implemented one years ago for a company doing corporate training (had to replace their flash system, ouch!) and it just wasn't that much work to build something in house that competed with the overpriced LMS PaaS's out there for their particular needs. My perception is people are paying a ton for all the feature bloat, and often using like 20% of it.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Hah! As soon as you posted this, my first thought was, "I bet they're getting overcharged by some shitty LMS". A lot of those companies resell video hosting for an insane markup. Glad you're trying to find them a better deal. If you need to be able to charge PPV or per month or whatever, Vimeo also offers a billable solution: https://vimeo.com/ott/pricing https://vimeo.com/ott/pricing (OTT is apparently "over-the-top", as in PPV that bypasses cable/satellite/etc... according to wikipedia. Must be a cable-era term.) There are a bunch of other providers in this space... here is one list by a company: https://www.dacast.com/blog/how-does-white-label-video-streaming-work/#anchor_4 https://www.dacast.com/blog/how-does-white-label-video-strea... Or you might be able to API-integrate Cloudflare Stream (or a similarly low-level CDN offering) with the LMS system directly, if they offer such interconnects. My guess is that ease of use would probably get you a better ROI than strong piracy protections in this case and it's probably not worth it to go for DRM or rental models? IMHO only.