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Comment by rubberstock | Hacker News Reader

Why don't you think that the hardest part is acquiring the viewers? At least nowadays, network traffic is cheap. You get 1TB for 1 euro [0]. You need 22 Mbps for 1080HD [1], which means you can stream 100 hours for 1 euro.

If you stream 5min clips, that's 1200 clips for 1 euro. There should be enough ad networks that offer 2 euro CPM to make a profit.

On the other hand, how can they make a profit if nobody is discovering their site?

[0] https://hetzner.de

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/434532/what-data-transfer-ra...

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>At least nowadays, network traffic is cheap.

But it's not. Your example is contrived, as Hetzner likely doesn't expect you to stream a 100 hours of 1080p HD content to 100 people simultaneously. Your users would have a laughably bad experience at scale. On a single box, it's unlikely you could max out your throughput - you could at most support 45 users on a single Hetzner node (1080p @ 22Mbps on a Gigabit connection in the best case).

If you are going to be serving content with any level of seriousness you need a CDN. 1TB of bandwidth on Cloudfront costs $87. Akamai charges $100-$150. Thats 100x than 1 euro/TB you initially priced out.

1TiB of CDN egress at market rate for large customers is less than a cup of coffee

Which you'd not be if you were just starting out. The cost also won't come down 90% no matter who you are. Big streaming networks often have to build their own to compete.

Akamai? Really. Either way, most of the ad revenue tends to come from the United States; the CDN is far from a requirement.

How would you build a video streaming service without a CDN? A CDN doesn't just solve the content distribution problem - it also solves the bandwidth problem.

With a 1Gig connection you can only serve ~45 concurrents streaming 1080p. If you wanted to support more than 45 concurrents, you would need

1. To distribute content to separate instances

2. A routing infrastructure to reliably route connections to that content.

And then, congrats, you have just built your own CDN - albeit in one datacenter. If you don't want your users on the other side of the country constantly complaining that your site is slow compared to Vimeo, you would have to build it on the other side as well.

If you believe your hodgepodge CDN is going to be much cheaper than Cloudfront (on the order of 1 Euro/month, where you could support it on ~1.5M views/month), then you should probably skip the whole video sharing nonsense, and get rich becoming a CDN provider :)

My point is, you don't need an expensive global CDN if your end goal is to optimize for ad-revenue within the U.S market. I don't know why you stuck on the CDN, and it sounds like you are using it as a hammer to achieve scalability.

I'm stuck on the CDN because you need something like a CDN to serve any meaningful number of concurrents. The numbers I quoted for cloudfront were for the US.

If you believe otherwise, please enlighten me on how you can build a HD video streaming service for 100 concurrents without a CDN. Like I mentioned, on a 1GbE connection, you can serve a theoretical max of 45 users on one node. Where do you go from there without something that looks like CDN?

When you flip that on its head those rates actually seem pretty nightmarish when trying to compete with YouTube.

1200 views for 1 euro, that's 1000 eur for a million views. On top of that YouTube's rates of paying creators are in the same ballpark at 1k/million views.

So yeah your ad model needs be paying 2k+ per million views ( any one more familiar with the ad industry know the real value made curiously? ) on a video or your screwed

And yet, by all accounts and signals, Youtube wasn't profitable for a decade and reportedly barely manages to break even today with a billion users.

Do you have a source for this? YouTube isn't broken out separately in Alphabet earning reports and the last anyone authoritative talked about YouTube finances this way was several years ago AFAICT.

There are no hard sources other than "Susan said they weren't profitable" back in 2016.

https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-woj...

By "all accounts and signals", I mean it's basically rumored that Youtube was only barely able to break even with a billion users, which was the target set to make it profitable: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...

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