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The 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 qu

The 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.

3 ms·

The 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 qu

by evancoop 5y ago

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.