Ask HN: Do you host paid video content? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you host paid video content?

15 pointsgrep16 comments

What technologies do you use? Which CDN (if any)?

We host paid video content. We support pay-per-minute, pay-per-view, and a variety of DRM technologies.

We offer native "paid video" streaming to Android, iDevices, and all flavors of personal computer. We support the current HTML5 video stack, including WebM. Our datacenters run Wowza Pro, IIS Media Services, Windows Media Server, Darwin Streaming Server, and other less well known services. We don't make customers share a slice of "a server", we're providing hierarchical video caching and distribution across an International footprint for even our $19.95/month customers.

We are a CDN -- or a VDN, actually:

http://www.advection.net/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/servic...

We like helping startups, so do Edgecast and BitGravity. If you don't need quite as much flexibility, Limelight's got great video infrastructure, while Akamai's the largest scale if you've got the budget.

http://www.edgecast.com/

http://www.bitgravity.com/ (home page is Flash)

http://www.limelightnetworks.com/

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/streaming.htm...

I always recommend Brightcove (http://www.brightcove.com). It's relatively cheap and has an amazing feature set. Everything is customizable and accessible via an API and even works in sans-Flash environments like the iPhone.

$499 for 250GB BW seems a bit too much.

It is, but you're paying for the player / CMS / advertising tools as well. It's a lot more than just a CDN.

If you are hosting paid video content then you probably don't have so many people accessing your content simultaneously, so hosting it yourself is not that difficult? I rented two servers at hetzner.de a few years ago.

49 Euros per month, 5 GB of streaming included, afterwards 6,90 per TB. As a streaming server Wowza is offering great software and service, the license was less than a 1000 $. With this setup you can get away for less than a hundred Euros per month and stream 10 terrabytes from two machines and can add easily more machines, when necessary, or use AWS as a fallbacksystem for trafficspikes. Beats pure AWS-Hosting by a wide, wide margin, at least it did for us...

Might I ask who you are and why you are asking? I get enough phone calls from CDN sales people that I don't want to give them more ammo or a bigger target lol

> I get enough phone calls from CDN sales people

And PS... we don't have any of those.

We're all devs or sysadmins and prefer time-shiftable email, so you'll never get a call from us unless you ask.

We use Bitgravity and could not be happier.

Revision3 and Break have switched to 3Crowd. Using Bitgravity and other CDNs all managed by 3Crowd. Must be something in that, huh?

At TekPub we use Amazon's CloudFront, it includes streaming (using Adobe's streaming server) and also allows for authenticated content. We do about 1-3 TB a month through it with basically no issues and pay less than $500/month even at the high end of that range.

Amazon CloudFront does not provide any security against copying your rtmp/http stream and paste it in any other website.

It most definitely does. You can authenticate using a token that only allows access via that url for a set period of time and also from a set range of IPs.

edit for link: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/De...

"You set the Amazon S3 ACL on your objects so that only you and CloudFront have read permission for the objects. This means that end user access to the objects can only be through CloudFront."

The ACL is for the S3 and not the CloudFront.

Don't take my word for it:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...

Edit: The signed URL protects the "copy and paste" but not the "easy" ripping.

If an authorized end user (meaning they have a valid signed URL) is ripping the content I don't see a way anyone could stop that. If nothing else I could easily just record my screen with a screen capture program. :)

Yes, but there's a difference in capturing the video one at a time or run Orbit and rip all the movies at once.

After having the same question and failing to find a good service i developed www.videolla.com for exactly this. It still not launched but feel free to get on our waiting list - i will be sending free invites soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com