Ask HN: How expensive is it to host and stream video?

18 pointsceezuns6y ago7 comments

Hi folks,

I'm thinking of launching a site that deals directly with uploading, hosting, and streaming videos.

I was wondering what the cost for this would like?

7 comments

Hey, I've worked in streaming video for 10 years now, and I co-organise the biggest video streaming conference in the world. Here's my insights.

If you want to build a video platform from scratch, your cost models are going to be dominated by the combination of data egress and CDN costs. Transcode and storage costs are non-trivial, but do quickly become noise against delivery costs.

As CyberFonic mentioned, AWS has a variety of media products, which for transcode and storage work well, but then to deliver you'll need a CDN to deliver the content. The simplest way of doing this is to just hook up CloudFront, but the list prices for CloudFront are very high ($0.085/GB in the US), you'll be able to negotiate this down, but Cloudfront isn't actually a great CDN performance wise (particularly outside the US), and eventually you'll want to use a multi-CDN strategy for performance and reliability reasons.

Then comes the second hit, if you store your content in AWS and need to egress to a third party CDN, you can be paying very high data rates on that data transfer, particularly in regions such as Asia and Australia / NZ.

Now, honestly, if you're small and have a lot of time to invest, go for it, it's an amazing learning experience, you can learn a lot about how streaming video works on these sites and playlists:

https://howvideo.works/ https://awesome.video/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIc_DkRxo9UgUSTvWVNCmpA

Honestly, my recommendation is to focus on content, and user experience, and utilise modern off-the-shelf video services, like:

Mux - https://mux.com - An API first video infrastructure provider (Disclaimer: I work here) Cloufdlare Stream - https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/

codegeek6y ago

Shout out to mux. We are not quite using it heavily yet for our company but I have been reviewing them for over a year. Mux is the best balance between a very rigid platform (like vimeo) and building your own. Using mux, you can build your own vimeo for example. We run edtech and mux is going to be our choice for video lessons. I personally have dabbled with encoding etc using ffmpeg but it is a whole different story doing it in a production environment.

I do have some additional feature request for mux like restricting by IP or http_referrer etc as a nice to have but otherwise, it is solid.

A closer competitor that I evaluated is Cloudflare stream but they are a bit more abstract than mux. So less controls on the player etc compared to mux where you come up with your own player.

japhyr6y ago

Wow, I'd heard of Mux before but never looked at it. The service looks impressive, and the pricing page is one of the clearest technically and financially that I've ever seen. It makes me want to include video in my projects!

CyberFonic6y ago

I invested 2 minutes of my time and found:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/live-streaming-on-aws/

and

https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/pricing/

Assuming you trial a MVP using AWS those two pages might give you some indication of ball park costs.

If you are looking at co-lo provisioning then you will probably need to plunk down in the order of USD10,000 to USD50,000 to test the waters.

Either way, in the long term I think your per minute per connection costs will probably be in the order of the AWS costings. After all, they do that sort of thing on a massive scale and have a great deal of experience.

Good luck with your planned venture.

adventured6y ago

To get better responses here, you'll want to add some additional information, such as: how large you're aiming for the service to be (50 users, a million users), what kind of video files will you be streaming (how large, what quality), what kind of performance demands do you need to meet for your users (will they get upset if you're ever down or your streaming quality isn't perfect), are you looking at self-hosting (smaller usage scenario) or cloud hosting, is it targeted at being a serious commercial service you charge for at some point, and so on.

ceezunsOP6y ago

Hi Folks,

Since additional details were requested, I'all add them.

I'm not quite sure how many users this will pickup, it depends on how on demand the site is, but I do YouTube / Twitch reliability and quality.

I can't quite say much more as I haven't fully thought through all the details, as I just want to put my foot into the water and know how much money it would take, before I invest any time.

stevenicr6y ago

buy mechbunny for $500 - setup hosting for $200 / month

if you outgrow that, you'll have better ideas / data on what you want to do and how to get there. You'll also be able to see if you can monetize enough to scale up bandwidth. You should have plenty of test the waters with 20TB a month I would think.

ymmv.

there are some similar options, but after doing some of these, this is where I'd start :)

be prepped for handling dmca contacts, and such or things spiral quickly. I've dabbled in this area for years.

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