Ask HN: How long until serving your own video is viable?
21 comments
>How long until serving your own video is viable?
Keep in mind it started out viable.
Broadband did exist even when most people were still on dial-up, and with every major ISP their generic plan included your own personal web space from which they would serve your content to the world.
All you had to do was upload your content to your own web address, and throw in some html or PHP if you wanted to.
Even if all you had was dial-up, you could (slowly) upload a decent length video, and after that anybody with broadband could watch it with full FPS.
The original webcams were jerky and blurry by today's standards but they live-streamed just fine using Windows XP and the free Windows Media Encoder. Anybody using Windows Media Player could view the stream directly without need for a browser. Also players like VLC work for Linux or Mac users.
Now OBS is a common app for streaming (broadcasting) today which allows you to encode or compress the video (output) or stream however you like. An HD webcam, fast PC, and fiber ISP connection can handle a number of simultaneous viewers at full FPS.
Keep in mind it started out viable.
Broadband did exist even when most people were still on dial-up, and with every major ISP their generic plan included your own personal web space from which they would serve your content to the world.
All you had to do was upload your content to your own web address, and throw in some html or PHP if you wanted to.
Even if all you had was dial-up, you could (slowly) upload a decent length video, and after that anybody with broadband could watch it with full FPS.
The original webcams were jerky and blurry by today's standards but they live-streamed just fine using Windows XP and the free Windows Media Encoder. Anybody using Windows Media Player could view the stream directly without need for a browser. Also players like VLC work for Linux or Mac users.
Now OBS is a common app for streaming (broadcasting) today which allows you to encode or compress the video (output) or stream however you like. An HD webcam, fast PC, and fiber ISP connection can handle a number of simultaneous viewers at full FPS.
Anyone serving anything publicly should be using a CDN for binary objects like images, videos, downloads, etc. That's why CDN plugins are among the most popular downloads for WordPress.
If you mean "without a CDN", then as someone whose daily job is delivering millions of users high quality videos, I would ask: why would anyone do that? It's like saying "I'll dig my own fibre to the home..." Sure, you may do it if you have no choice, or you simply use an ISP.
CDNs distribute the load and make it more economic to deliver your content. They provide lower cost and better quality streams through more servers and higher available bandwidth.
Sure, you host the videos, you act as the origin, but the CDN sits in front and takes the load. You only have to worry about cache efficiency for your bandwidth. But I can say that you can serve millions of users with 10Gbps and a good CDN, which is feasible for home internet in some places.
For the self-hosting numbers, without a CDN, just take the average bitrate and times that by the number of concurrent users. So you are going to be looking at 6Mbps * 100 users = 600Mbps upload, plus about 10-20% overhead/margin.
If you mean "without a CDN", then as someone whose daily job is delivering millions of users high quality videos, I would ask: why would anyone do that? It's like saying "I'll dig my own fibre to the home..." Sure, you may do it if you have no choice, or you simply use an ISP.
CDNs distribute the load and make it more economic to deliver your content. They provide lower cost and better quality streams through more servers and higher available bandwidth.
Sure, you host the videos, you act as the origin, but the CDN sits in front and takes the load. You only have to worry about cache efficiency for your bandwidth. But I can say that you can serve millions of users with 10Gbps and a good CDN, which is feasible for home internet in some places.
For the self-hosting numbers, without a CDN, just take the average bitrate and times that by the number of concurrent users. So you are going to be looking at 6Mbps * 100 users = 600Mbps upload, plus about 10-20% overhead/margin.
LinusTechTips did a video on 4K video a month or so ago that may be part of the answer: in it, Linus explains the exponential costs of higher definition video and faster streaming speeds.
To be more explicit: you can probably host video now at lower definitions. The question is how low you can tolerate.
To be more explicit: you can probably host video now at lower definitions. The question is how low you can tolerate.
h.264 basically works everywhere. I don't think bitrate scaling is super easy out of the box, but if you do 3?Mbps 720p, that's going to look ok and work ok for a large swath of people and you can stick it in a video tag. Maybe there's some simple software to do bitrate selection and all the transcodes at all the bitrates (and may as well do different codecs while you're at it), but I'm not aware of it.
If you've got enough usage where bandwidth starts costing money, go get a cheap hosting with 'unmetered' bandwidth, and maybe that can get you through until you have enough bandwidth usage to get decent pricing.
If you've got enough usage where bandwidth starts costing money, go get a cheap hosting with 'unmetered' bandwidth, and maybe that can get you through until you have enough bandwidth usage to get decent pricing.
I've used bunny.net as a CDN for images for an advertising company transferring about 1.5TB/day at a cost of ~$150/month. I haven't tried their streaming video service, but it seems reasonably priced.
That's a surprisingly low number. I'll have look at them.
Maxing out the sliders on bunny.net's pricing page (1TB video uploads/ 1TB bandwidth per month) with 8 replication points tops out at $80/month. That's with free encoding and transcoding.
So, very affordable right now if you want to use someone else's solution.
So, very affordable right now if you want to use someone else's solution.
fasterthanlime hosts his own videos, made his own video player, and does his own transcoding: https://fasterthanli.me/videos
My personal website has a 'digital garden' section that has a number of sports highlights videos. Because I self-host, I shorten the videos to 30 seconds maximum and compress them heavily in Handbrake. The resulting videos are usually 1MB or under. They look OK when viewed in a browser window that's about the size of a YouTube embed. That's fine with me, they're the kind of short video you wouldn't want to watch full-screen.
Bandwidth is really cheap now and open source is available (e.g. PeerTube) so this is probably already possible.
You should define "complete control". Do CDNs count or not? Why?
You should define "complete control". Do CDNs count or not? Why?
Peertube on a dedicated server somewhere with unmetered bandwidth? Worst case, users experience lag during congestion periods.
Someone recently sponsored dev (putting it on the roadmap) of remote transcode runners to enable better horizontal scaling if that’s a component of your use case.
If you’re maxing out a dedicated server, should probably consider a CDN.
Someone recently sponsored dev (putting it on the roadmap) of remote transcode runners to enable better horizontal scaling if that’s a component of your use case.
If you’re maxing out a dedicated server, should probably consider a CDN.
Should be easily doable with 50$ and less / month.
Traffic is cheap you get 100mbit and more for this. 100-1000mbit/your avg Bitrate = streams in parallel.
The hardware side is a no-brainer. Just doesn't matter just sending bytes is easy.
Traffic is cheap you get 100mbit and more for this. 100-1000mbit/your avg Bitrate = streams in parallel.
The hardware side is a no-brainer. Just doesn't matter just sending bytes is easy.
I streamed meetings live via the internet over a decade ago using Microsoft's IIS on an AWS instance. I'm quite sure its easier to do these days.
You could always pay Vimeo to host your content.
You could always pay Vimeo to host your content.
This is an interesting question.
How about putting the file on IPFS and making it available to the world? Or use GunDB to stream the content.
How about putting the file on IPFS and making it available to the world? Or use GunDB to stream the content.
Viable now, easily.
You could do p2p
Would love to see any numbers that are involved in working this out, how those numbers are trending, and if it looks like they will arrive at useful values any time soon.