> I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.
Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?
Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?
Otherwise, I'll take a look into S3/CloudFront.
Didn't even think that far, lol. Thanks for the info!
Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs. Users won't be able to select playback quality, and on a slow connection, they'll get endless buffering.
You'll have to come up with your own systems for counting how many people viewed the video and which bits they bailed out on. You'll have to reinvent caption translations and go to extra effort to get captions working at all.
Self hosted videos have mostly died for the above reasons.
This advice is pretty stale: 3G is rather old by now – 4G came out in 2009 – and unless you’re still supporting IE8 HTML5 makes it easy to let the browser select from multiple sources (subtitles have similarly had wide support for at least half a decade). Properly hinted video will start playing pretty quickly — certainly not massively slower than someone with 3G on an old device is going to experience everywhere else, especially since that old device isn’t going to pick the 4K version anyway.
When traveling to places with 4G or LTE coverage I'm often downgraded to 3G or edge. My parents' home has mostly 2G/edge connectivity, with some spotty 3G coverage on the second floor. They're "only" on the outskirts of a greater metropolitan area.
Just because some tech is old doesn't mean it's not very much still relevant.
The point is with HLS or DASH and CloudFlare you can provide the exact same experience to all your users. You can easily automate the process, which I've done. All other problems are already solved by player software like Clappr, JWPlayer, VideoJS, etc. They all use HLS.js and Dash.js in the background...
It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day.
Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident.
Hosting video is harder than it seems :(
So if you have 5GB of videos that ALL get watched 10,000 times you will be out $500, so maybe problematic. Or calculated another way, 2.2mbps is good for 720p and comes out to 1GB/hour, so your cost is basically $0.01 per hour of video streamed (plus $5/month).
But as far as I know, CF has more free traffic than S3.
You are not going to get even one video watched 10k times, not to mention all of those videos. 10K video views is pretty darn close to head rather than the tail.
If you did, you would be making a million a year like @BrunchBoys on IG and hiring people to build an independent platform so when Youtube/Google/FB shut you down you would still have a way to deliver your awesome videos and make money.
P.S. You can always proxy EC2 traffic through the Lightsail to have a cheap delivery.
10K views of a video that's more than a few minutes long is a big deal. Having a hundred of those means a producer is either a celebrity or a real business specializing in video content.
While traditional hosters often include traffic with their offerings or charge a much lower amount. For example Hetzner (Big traditional German hoster) costs 1 EUR/TB and traffic is inclusive with most bigger/dedicated offers.
Nitpick: you mean either "extortionate" or something to do with ogliopolies, cartels, and price fixing; usury is when the perpetrator charges interest on a non-defaultable loan.