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Technical solutions exist and should be implemented by experienced people, but if it is central to your business model to sell video streams, you must absolutel
by POPOSYS 4y ago
Technical solutions exist and should be implemented by experienced people, but if it is central to your business model to sell video streams, you must absolutely understand the risks and challenges before you start and need to protect against unexpected cost explosion.
In any case, you need throttling / DDOS protection or a similar mechanism that will stop video download when you get too many requests - this risk is very real and when you can not stop some bot downloading videos a trillion times you can be killed financially in one day.
This must be implemented in some hard technical limitation on the server / service provider site and should not be some soft agreement like e.g. "we will find a solution, just go ahead".
Also very important is to implement all video streaming costs in a pre-paid fashion - put the max amount of money you are ready to pay for monthly delivery into the account in advance, but make absolutely sure that delivery stops when that money is burned. It is better to be offline for some while (or deliver some reduced quality content that is much less traffic intensive) than to go broke in one night.
But you do not only have to prepare for abuse and errors, you also have to see that in the long run, when the number of subscribers get bigger and bigger, you need a good solution to guarantee that the ongoing downloads of (old) subscribers will not accumulate to astronomical numbers - we could speak of an "inverted long tail" here that will eat more and more money. Plan ahead!
There are many more problems with selling video content and this was just a small introduction, but contained the most important points.
Sometimes it turns out that it will be a much safer solution to NOT sell the video content but sell additional services around your videos - put your videos on YT, forget about all problems with video hosting and focus on selling many much less intense products and services, while your videos generate lots of subscribers, because you will never deliver to as many people as YT can.
Good luck!