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Victims of Vimeo
- arnaudsm 5y agoAnyone knows a creator-friendly video platform?
- chockchocschoir 5y agoThat's such a broad criteria that it's next to impossible to give good recommendations. What does that mean? Could you make a list of requirements that would make one platform more "creator-friendly" than another?
- mikepurvis 5y agoI think one of the biggest key questions is, how much do you need/want the platform to assist with authoring, engagement, and discovery? YouTube is okay at this; TikTok is excellent at it. TikTok provides the fyp, community management, authoring and captioning tools, access to thousands of sound/music clips to use where they're handling the legal side, etc. Ostensibly this is very, very "creator-friendly", but only for a fairly specific niche of TikTok-like content, and only if you're not skirting the line of what they'll censor. Vimeo has always felt to me more like a larger Vidyard— the content is 100% on you, but they'll handle the technical side as far as encoding and distributing, and give you a clean player widget you can embed on your own site.
- atoav 5y agoEmbedding a HTML5 video player with some javascript on top is quite trivial. I think the actual, reliable, fast and somewhat affordable global distribution of video streams is the actual meat of the problem from the perspective of someone who would eventually just self-host. That doesn't mean that a considerable amount of non-tech or low-tech (for certain definitions of low) people wouldn't rely on the actual tech expertise in terms of encodings, poster frames, subtitles, chapter marks, time-coded comments or similar things.
- mikepurvis 5y agoSure, but that comes back to who the "creator" is in this scenario and what their actual needs are. Embeddable video hosting might be perfect for an e-learning site, or an indie film studio, or someone providing paid online music lessons, or whatever. But if the "creator" in this scenario is khaby.lame or kallmekris, a service that helps them host their own videos on their own site is of zero use; those are social media personalities who take the hosting and technical side for granted— their primary need is exposure to a gigantic audience.
- atoav 5y agoFor which Vimeo was never the golden choice before. Most people I know who pay for vimeo are film makers who need hosting, sometimws for piblic stuff, sometimes with a password for preview purposes. A bit like soundcloud for video.
- alexrsagen 5y agoFloatplane? Linus and Luke at Linus Tech Tips (some of the people behind the service) always say it was made for creators.
- rwmj 5y agoIs it sustainable long term if it drifts along without either making much money or attracting much audience?
- bsder 5y ago> Is it sustainable long term if it drifts along without either making much money or attracting much audience? Erm, aren't those exactly opposed? "Drift along" as long as you are profitable is the definition of sustainable, no? "Attracting too much audience" is anathema to sustainable if you can't maintain reliability or profitability in the face of the flood.
- rwmj 5y agoI maybe didn't phrase it well, but I'm talking about companies that make just enough money to sustain themselves but never quite grow nor go out of business. (I founded one and it wasn't very much fun. We eventually killed it, but it was never unprofitable). Anyhow it seems like floatplane hasn't made much of an impact - it's not huge like Youtube or growing massively - so does it have long term prospects?
- bsder 5y agoI don't see pricing on Floatplane. Lack of pricing is a non-starter.
- Elidrake42 5y agohttps://www.floatplane.com/support https://www.floatplane.com/support That's because they don't charge content creators; as it's a pay to play only platform, they make money from the individuals that subscribe to you. The amount you charge is up to you, though they only list the minimum once you have an account.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- logifail 5y ago> Anyone knows a creator-friendly video platform? Let's rephrase that, if you have easy access to hosting and [sufficient] bandwidth, can anyone recommend creator-friendly tooling such that you can just host your content yourself? I'm so done with relying on third parties to do a poor job hosting stuff I created :(
- ______-_-______ 5y agoIf you're comfortable self-hosting, I think PeerTube is the go-to option. Federation is optional.
- jraph 5y agoWell, PeerTube is not too hard to install and is quite pleasant to use… https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/doc/production.md https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/...
- slimscsi 5y agoIf an install is necessary, you have already lost 90% of your viewers.
- jraph 5y agoViewers don't install anything. That would be the content creator here because the question is "as a content creator who wants to self host, what can I use?", but that could also be someone the content creator knows, or someone providing a PeerTube instance for content creators. PeerTube is a piece of open source software meant to build a YouTube-like platform, with optional federation (and P2P to allow servers to offload some bandwidth to viewers, but I don't know how well this works in practice with the widespread asymmetrical or mobile internet connections). It is not for the viewer to install.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- schainks 5y agoIs Nebula a good fit for creator-friendly video platform?
- smoldesu 5y agoNebula requires a subscription to view, it's no more "creator-friendly" than cable television.
- xwdv 5y agoMy suggestion is just get a smaller audience. Have paid subscriptions for content.
- JadoJodo 5y agoIs this not what the entire talk about this issue has been?
- mikysco 5y ago"With this in mind, a few months ago, our company, AE assembled a subscription video platform for health and fitness" Did I miss something or does the blog not link to the new platform?
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y agoYeah so what is their pricing?
- memecatcher 5y agoRight now our pricing is $1/user, but with a minimum of $500. We're considering adding a self service option at a lower price point (as this definitely prices out some potential customers), but right now we only offer very white-glove service for our customers and its not economically viable for us to cater to smaller customers with the level of dedication we want to deliver to each of them. We have a dedicated account manager for all our customers, offer iOS and Android apps released under the customer organizations, develop features for the platform based on customer requests, help with migration and design, etc. It's interesting that Vimeo is also now not catering to smaller creators, as its something we decided not to focus on also for viability reasons early on and instead double down on providing a better platform for a higher price point. Vimeo's decision also makes me reconsider if we should allow a cheaper self service option on Instill - the thing I worry about is that given variable costs like streaming we'd have to cover, we'd still need to charge some amount that people didn't feel was "cheap" and so they would expect some greater value to accompany the offering that we wouldn't be able to deliver (ex. we wouldn't be able to have as fast support or an AM help them set up their offering, etc.)
- bdougherty 5y agoYeah the link is there with the text “subscription video platform”: https://instillvideo.com/ https://instillvideo.com/ Took me a minute to find it again because their visited link color is the same as the text color
- mikysco 5y ago
- throwawaygh 5y agoHow many of the problems plaguing the modern web could be solved by universal computer literacy -- teaching folks, along with typing and Word/Powerpoint/Excel -- how to host a static website that holds text/photos/video.
- memecatcher 5y agoDefinitely would help a lot. Although I'm not sure we can expect everyone to develop the simplest next step of literacy that creators might need here- having that site also be able to have user accounts, charge users, restrict access appropriately. Since these things are pretty universal, I do also think the no-code space is attempting to meet people halfway there -- letting people do stuff on their own with basic literacy without having to reinvent the wheel each time requiring some deeper (even if still basic) knowledge. Of course some centralized solutions do have predatory pricing to take advantage of the fact that many people need that abstraction layer, but I suspect the problem is also two fold - running the quick math on some of the example creators about to be kicked off of Vimeo, I suspect many of them would find the costs of running this service (especially if they wanted "good" streaming) themselves to be expensive also, not counting the additional time that would be required of them even if they could do it.
- carrick__44 5y agoSo basically this is a promotion post?
- memecatcher 5y agoI'm not the post creator, but I'm one of the founders of Instill. I don't think it was intended as such as the HN crowd isn't really our target customer (non-technical health & fitness content creators who need a comprehensive / white glove solution to launching a subscription content platform, not people who can engage in a debate about the cheapest way to set up your own infra to stream videos haha). Ev had some interesting thoughts about Vimeo's huge shift which were informed by us having started this platform some months ago based in part on some pushpack from content creators on Vimeo. Of course, as an early startup, we will also take any attention we can get so I don't hate if this wound up being a little bit of both ;)
- superasn 5y agoDigitalocean spaces is $5 for 250 GB while Contabo offers the same for $2.49 / mo. I'm sure there are others too. I think DO also offers a free CDN with edge caching. If not, just put it behind a cloudflare or amazon cloudfront proxy and you can stream unlimited videos very cheap (probably in 4k i guess). Also for most cases it works best to use the KISS <video controls> tag instead of any silly skins that make users think. (1) https://contabo.com/en/object-storage/ https://contabo.com/en/object-storage/
- systemvoltage 5y agoWe can start YouTube competitor with your enthusiasm alone and bypass all the T&C violations.
- jandrese 5y agoAnd then get sued to death by media cartels and carted off to jail for hosting child porn. If you are hosting only your own content it's pretty easy. Once you put that upload link on the site it gets a lot more complicated.
- systemvoltage 5y agoEven hosting your own content, it cannot sustain any reasonable virality. Any widespread consumption requires a giant buffer of Big Tech with deep pockets.
- phonon 5y agoAWS Lightsail is a full server with 2 TB of data transfer for $5/m. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
- em-bee 5y agohetzner servers are at around $50/month but with 1Gbit link you get unlimited traffic: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ for selfhosting your own videos that should be sufficient.
- briandoll 5y agoSurprised nobody mentioned Mux yet, who are really great at providing a video platform for all sorts of apps and businesses: https://mux.com/ https://mux.com/
- pg5 5y agoDoesn't Reddit use Mux? Reddit's video player is atrocious. I'm not sure whether it is the fault of Reddit or Mux though.
- mmcclure 5y ago(Mux founder here) Yes, Reddit is a customer, but they use Data (our quality of service analytics tool), not Video (our suite of video streaming APIs). So...it's our fault if they don't have visibility into you having a bad time, but we aren't in a place to actually fix it quite yet :)
- pg5 5y agoI'm very glad to hear that this is the case, as the developer experience for streaming via Mux looks awesome - much less of a headache than building out a transcoding/delivery pipeline with separate transcoding APIs, object storage, and CDNs. I'll be giving the Mux streaming API a try for my next project.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- memecatcher 5y agoMux is awesome. We are using Mux for Instill. Super reliable and by far the most developer friendly option we found. There is ways to do it cheaper for sure, but when evaluating all the time spent setting up and maintaining all the infra required to do that (especially since we want to get as close to zero downtime, working on almost all device types, fast global delivery, wanted to get Instill up and running fast etc.) we decided it was well worth the cost. Also funnily enough, Vimeo uses Mux (their analytics offering Mux Data, but still pretty crazy).
- evancoop 5y agoThe idea here is that there are certainly costs of storage and streaming. And there are certainly SOME customers that probably aren't optimal to serve. The question is whether one can help those customers grow, and if not, avoid the bait/switch/shock paradigm of Vimeo. How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a better model that could scale with them?
- throwawaygh 5y ago> How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a better model that could scale with them? Most of them, and I kind of suspect that most creators already do. I've been involved in a half dozen different video distribution projects, mostly in the education and non-profit spaces and mostly in the last couple of years (for obvious reasons). In all but one case, we just threw some <video> tags into a free static site template and hosted the videos themselves directly on the same VPS hosting the static site. In the other case, a single server probably wouldn't have scaled, so we had... gasp... TWO VPSs. (Didn't even bother with a software load balancer... just did it by hand by giving out different urls to different groups). Uploading videos to youtube et al. didn't even occur to us. But then, we were hosting content for an audience that was already seeking us out because of who we were independent of the video content, so we didn't need the discoverability aspect. I suspect this still describes the vast majority of high-quality content hosting, even if the influencer economy or whatever gets the majority of attention. And I'd be surprised if many folks bother uploading those videos to youtube et al It's like the rest of the economy. There are some behemoths that everyone pays attention to, but a huge fraction of economic activity is a small handful of folks with a truck/storefont/field.
- tempnow987 5y agoThis is a story as old as the internet. The unlimited 4K bandwidth is not... unlimited. I get the AWS is terrible, charges too much etc. But after being burnt, repeatedly, by unlimited offerings elsewhere, at some point it's just worth paying their storage price or whatever and just know they will be very unlikely to bait and switch you on pricing. Yes, I'm looking at your unlimited backup storage data plans deals, your "lifetime" offers, your unmetered / unlimited (but wildly oversubscribed and/or we'll give you a call if you actually spin up 20 instances and max transfer on each).
- nullc 5y agoIt seems a little bad-faith of the article to relegate to a footnote at the bottom their admission that the practice they're complaining about was changed three days before their article was written.
- zirobi 5y agoFootnote 3 should be a big disclaiming banner above the article