Show HN: Vittyo, Roll your own video store | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Vittyo, Roll your own video store

vittyo.com

36 pointscsytan29 comments

Hey HN,

My co-founder and I have recently launched our project which lets people build stores to sell their streaming video content. We've been working on it for almost 5 months now.

Let us know what you think!

Sincerely,

Chris & Ivan

Looks pretty cool, congrats!

My main concern is how do you plan to compete with YouTube? They offer a rentals marketplace which may still be in beta. Also, they have serious money behind their technology for large scale streaming, and currently have a majority of the traffic in that space.

just like Vimeo, we are trying to target at the "indie" and more serious group of video makers than YouTube, by providing them lots more room of customization and personal branding.

the focus is very different: Vimeo and YouTube are more like a hub, while we try to be a service.

Thanks! guys for helping me understand a lil bit more.

We are currently in the YouTube Rentals program, may have to test it out and see how some of our content performs on your platform. Once we finish, off course.

Keep coding!

Cool, let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

csytan@gmail.com

Thanks, that's a good question.

We are more targeted towards small-time content producers than the major movie production companies. Think mom and pop store selling custom bags vs Nike bags sold at Walmart.

We run on Google Appengine & Amazon Cloudfront, so there shouldn't be any problem with scaling. We also use http://zencoder.com/ (ycombinator '10) for video encoding, and they've been great!

Congratulations! Love the design and the simplicity.

What do you use for video encoding?

We tried many solutions, currently using Zencoder.

Glad to hear it - I'm a co-founder over there. Let me know if you need anything. :)

Nice, I like the simplicity.

Thanks. We worked really really hard on that.

I love the idea, have thought about doing something similar in the past.

It looks like all the stores are hosted as subdomains of vittyo.com. It would nice to run a vittyo store on my own domain.

Thanks, it's in the works :)

Two things:

1. Check your spelling.

2. Buffering...

Hey moe, I can't do anything about the buffering unfortunately, but could you link to the spelling error?

Edit: thanks, Ivan fixed it a few minutes ago

There aren't 2 Ts or any Ys in "video", duh.

Nice try, GWB. We all know there's a "Y" in "Vidya" as in "Vidya games".

Been fixed. It said "mintues" instead of "minutes" in a pretty obvious place. ;-)

I found that it did little to no buffering when I tried the demo films.

What kind of connection are you using?

The conn should be fine but I'm in europe, perhaps that's the problem?

I get frequent stutters on this video (which is otherwise great btw!): http://wizardsmoke.vittyo.com/videos/98401

We're using Amazon Cloudfront so there should be an edge server in Europe, but maybe it takes awhile before it's distributed there. That being said, I've got a slower connection at home which can stutter on some of the HD stuff. It's a trade off on using RTMP; security vs the ability to buffer the entire video.

Just to make sure: can the customer download content, not just stream it? Thanks.

Right now it's only streaming, but the purchase will be recorded and the viewer can stream it as many times as she likes. It's easy to do the downloading option but less secure in terms of piracy issues.

Why not make it an option (for the content producer)? A lot of filmmakers generate income from stock footage on the side as well. You guys could undercut the stock footage monopoly. Just a thought from a prospective client. Thanks.

This is officially on the roadmap. Cheers :-)

Nice one Chris & Ivan! Love the simplicity also.

What percentage of the sales are you guys taking or is there a monthly fee?

We don't hav a specific pricing plan yet, that's way running beta to figure out people's usage pattern first.

Like Ivan said, we don't know exactly yet. But we are leaning towards a monthly fee and not a % of sales.

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