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Comment by kitbrennan | Hacker News Reader

Looks like an interesting proposition.

Two pieces of feedback:

* Alarm bells ring when a company says where they are mentioned in the press but fail to link to any articles.

* I really struggled to find your pricing. I saw plans starting at $2.99 but the obvious next question was: "What are the plans? How much will I actually pay?" I ended up in your Help Center before I could find an answer.

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Our press kit has links to the major articles (https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/curiositystream-is-the-w...).

Pricing is $2.99/month for SD quality and $5.99/month for HD.

Why the difference in price? Is the bandwidth more expensive or is it people will pay for a higher def stream?

Definitely bandwidth, HD video is much larger and more difficult to stream than SD.

How are you doing the streaming? I've done some work on my end for a media streamer a friend and I wrote for out NASs.

We can stream 1080p quite easily to our mobile devices from a home internet connection over a cell phone 4g plan.

My friend settled on VP9 but I was using plain MP4s. VP9 in my experience, if you have money, is the way to go. I'd setup an S3 bucket with all of my home videos and do an AWS lambda to transcode it when I finally find a job.

I don't know how well this falls into your use case because you, I assume, need DRM but I'm sure you can still find a way to do it with HTML5.

I'm really interested in your product and think I may buy it.

Video streamed through the internet is generally not just MP4 in a muxed container but some form of multi-bitrate adaptive stream that deals with smaller segments of content. Eg see Apple's HTTP Live Streaming or MPEG Dash.

Exactly, we did a whole post about it here https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

Yea I understand that. My comment is more about how it's possible that HD streaming would cost that much more.

I've been able to do it at a bitrate that is acceptable over a crappy network. I'd say that I'm not very smart and that a group of well-paid engineers should be able to do better than that.

If the cost is just "because people will pay that much more for it" then that is fine but as it rests right now it is because "the bandwidth would cost that much more"

A lot of the problem comes with A: High Quality B: High Scale C: Consistent quality internationally

Properly encoded HD video is still easily 4 times larger than the SD equivalent, so that leads to 4 times the bandwidth costs.

We actually wrote a blog post about it here, let us know what you think! https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

I'll be sure to check it out. Probably going to be a good read.

"more difficult to stream"

please describe?

Well when we say "more difficult to stream", we really mean more difficult to stream WELL. With a larger file you are inherently prone to longer start times, more buffering, and therefore a worse user experience. That's when you start having to add CDN's, better caching, and better encoding. The vast majority of people out there barely have the bandwidth to stream HD under perfect conditions. We always have to make sure we aren't the bottleneck.

Thanks for the reply.

Here is the case study limelight has:

http://img03.en25.com/Web/LLNW/%7B95f3b395-f77e-4642-bc09-aa...

I missed the connection to the Discovery Channel founder the first time around.

Again, thanks for answering the question and pointing to the medium post.

Thanks for providing the SD option. I don't care about HD and would gladly save the money.

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