Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

I am curious if this means they will enable access controls on streams somehow.

One of the challenges with video delivery and where sites like YouTube can't work is if your business relies on providing videos to paid or logged-in members only.

Patreon creators get around this in a kludgy way by using unlisted YT videos (which can still be shared by rogue patrons) but that's not ideal.

But if you want to control access to a stream based on some custom business logic in your application, you're currently stuck serving your own video or using one of the existing combination of encoder/server/player that their post alludes to.

View on HN

We already do that for other types of content. Won't be different for video.

That's great to hear! I'm not familiar with all your services so I didn't know you already did this..

This is commonly solved using Amazon S3 and single-access tokens I think?

Pretty hefty work involved in getting it reliable, would be nice for a "drop in" solution.

Cloudflare provides that already: https://blog.cloudflare.com/token-authentication-for-cached-...

Cloudfront supports private content [1].

Its good to see video encoding/storage/delivery maturing; the more players in the space, the more options one has to choose from if a provider prefers to not host your content (whether that's because of a ToS violation, or because the company CEO just doesn't want to host your content). "Drop in" solutions give your provider a great deal of control over your fate, which is okay, until its not.

With Patreon raising a large round ($60MM) of financing [2], I'd expect them to build out their own streaming system based on S3, an encoding engine, and a CDN, versus be under the control of a turnkey provider (a la Reddit having to move off of Imgur).

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...

[2] https://patreonhq.com/new-round-funding-816d5a592477

(serious question) why would Patreon build out their own video hosting system? Unless I misunderstand their business model, that's not really part of their core business.

I feel like video hosting/streaming is part of their Patron's businesses, not theirs. They just manage the subscriptions.

If I was an investor in Patreon, I would not want them spending my money building out a proprietary video hosting platform.

> why would Patreon build out their own video hosting system?

Because a fair number of Patreoneers (this really needs a better name) have private videos for patrons and, if hosted by Patreon, they can do a much better job of keeping them private than, say, making the Patreoneers use YouTube with a private link and hoping no-one leaks it.

I disagree. As has been mentioned, a common use case of Patreon is providing exclusive, private videos to patrons. Hosting it themselves of course allows access of the video to be aligned with payment.

It probably also wouldn't be that expensive. Their videos would mostly be behind paywalls. It's not like YouTube or Reddit Videos where they could get a million views overnight. So the delivery cost would be naturally constrained.

Right, but why wouldn't they just use Cloudflare or some other CDN partner?

I am talking about them 'hosting it themselves' via the use of CloudFlare.

And here's another good reason - https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/91341833850793574...

YouTube apparently blocking links to Patreon (and others) on videos unless they're monetised.

"Here's a fun wrinkle: if your channel doesn't have at least 10,000 total views, you can't monetize at all. Small channels with dedicated Patreon supporters are F'd."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com