So it's not that hard to do a good job of it, but it is work, and it's work with diminishing returns if you're not comfortable managing the lift. And once you g

So it's not that hard to do a good job of it, but it is work, and it's work with diminishing returns if you're not comfortable managing the lift. And once you get it working, it might require some experimentation here and there to get exactly what you want out of it. The HLS spec is readily available and ffmpeg can, given a video input, emit an HLS manifest with a set of renditions. (For research purposes, the magic words are probably "ffmpeg hls adaptive streaming". Also, tweaking those renditions is a rabbit hole. Bring lunch.) At that point you've just got video files and text-based manifests that can be uploaded somewhere, and you point a sufficiently smart video player at them. For context, I work at Mux [ https://mux.com https://mux.com ] where SaaS video streaming is our bag; having previously built DIY solutions as mentioned above I think that Mux is probably the right choice for most folks who just want to ship a VOD or a live stream in a usable format--and you pay for it, you're the customer--but the tools are there if you want to take a swing at it.