6 ms·
Ask HN: What kind of infrastructure is needed for a video sharing service?
I know Netflix and Twitch used Amazon's servers, but what kind of operating costs are to be expected for this kind of service? For a whole year of operation?
Or if one is to have a service to share up to 3 minutes of videos max, what kind of costs does one have to expect, per year of operation? Should one use the same CDN provided by the hosting service or use Akamai like Facebook?
And what are the data centers and CDNs that are interesting for small to medium video sharing startups?
How does Azure compare to Amazon? Does anybody know about any relevant and interesting whitepapers out there?
- stephengillie 11y agoWith a video sharing service, you have large amounts of data transfer, and data storage. You're basically pushing large BLObs around your servers and to your users. If you have a relatively simple page, you could get by with low compute - you're just transferring HTML, CSS, and the binary. HTML5 video players are simple and easy to find, I've done it in just a few lines for a demo. I actually had more problems converting the video than getting the HTML5 player to work. What resolution would that 3 minutes of video be? That might impact your plans. And how many people do you expect to see a single 3 minute video? Multiply the video size (in MB) by the number of expected downloads to get an idea of the bandwidth for that video. Multiply that bandwidth by the number of videos to get an idea for how much bandwidth you'll need for the whole site. Of course page loads and overhead will add to that, I'm not sure exactly how much but I'd add 20% to your bandwidth estimates just so you have some spare bandwidth. You should absolutely look into CDNs. They reduce the load on your servers while getting stuff to your users faster. I think Cloudflare might have a free tier, and other CDNs might too. Azure isn't as well-known as Amazon; if you're expecting to be able to Google blog posts when you have problems, I'd go with Amazon. And there are other cloud hosts, ranging from nearly Azure size, to much smaller. You might choose a lower-cost more-distant datacenter, and a low-cost or free CDN, to start your MVP. If you're interested in using .NET or IIS, then look into Bizspark.
- dragonbonheur 11y agoThanks for your answer. I was more curious about what kind of costs are associated with apps like Periscope, Mixvid or Vine rather than simple web pages, but thanks again for taking the time to provide an answer.
- dragonbonheur 11y ago[Update] Used Bing and found those articles. I'll add more when I find more of them. https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to-start-youtube/ https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to-start-... http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-monetization-success-will-surprise/ http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-monetization-s... http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds-hottest-startups/ http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds-h... http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live-stream-46092521 http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live-stream-46092521
- trcollinson 11y agoAt a recent startup I was helping with we had a video and image service. We utilized the video storage from both youtube and vimeo rather than hosting it ourselves. The application itself was more in line with a Vine or Periscope (in fact, a lot like Periscope). As part of our agreement with youtube and vimeo we had to handle some video processing. We had about 300,000 users, spread across just about every continent. We ran 12 front end web servers, 10 processing servers, a mongo cluster, used s3 storage, and Amazon CloudFront for CDN. Our bill for those 300,000 users was about $12,000 a month. Again, we did not actually STORE the videos, we allows youtube and vimeo to do that. The price also did not scale as one might imagine. The more users you have the higher the cost per user gets. This is because the more users you have, the more traffic you seem to get to each video and so bandwidth, which was by far the highest cost, would go up quite a lot.
- dragonbonheur 11y agoThanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?
- trcollinson 11y agoWell yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads. However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers: Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it was possible for us to monetize the videos. Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them to accomplish something like this yes. Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :) We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to just know when to fold them.