Definitely 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.
Right 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.)
I'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 ;)
Mux 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).
You are not marked as active. So if you're pretending to be working while you're not, you may get caught. ;) Or it might be scary for people receiving ghost messages...
Great point, we'll have to look into changing this!