Victims of Vimeo
ae.studio
ae.studio
Let's rephrase that, if you have easy access to hosting and [sufficient] bandwidth, can anyone recommend creator-friendly tooling such that you can just host your content yourself?
I'm so done with relying on third parties to do a poor job hosting stuff I created :(
Most of your garden variety blog/CMS engines have plugins that can even automatically take media uploads and stash them on Amazon or a similar CDN. For something that's not even that big, that might even be overkill. If the amount of data transferred monthly is low enough, you could probably just serve it off a VPS.
If I had to actually recommend a service it'd be Cloudflare Stream[0], which allows you to upload videos, CF transcodes them, and you get a link to a page with just the video player[1], and they offer options like only allowing embeds on certain origins and disabling/enabling MP4 downloads. The pricing is fairly reasonable as well at $1 per 1,000 watch minutes and $5 per 1,000 minutes of stored video.
0: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
1: https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823cefd...
but why does it need to have all these different formats and bitrates?
varying devices/platforms support varying formats
>bitrates
so some guy on watching on a 3G connection doesn't need to watch your 4K stream.
You can probably implement a part of these features imperfectly in a regular CMS and with the video tag, but you may as well use readily-available software that do this job for you well.
If you host, occasionally, one or two videos, that's probably the best thing to do, but if you are to create a channel, you are probably better of using dedicated software.
* I think it’s dubious that S3 & CloudFront is really DIY anyway but hey, if you already broke the seal.
You know how much cloudfront bandwidth costs? $0.085/GB. Vimeo has a 2TB/month limit before they "may reach out to discuss a more suitable plan for your needs". If you consume that much bandwidth, it would already be costing you $170/month on AWS for the bandwidth alone. I suspect viemo's plans are still going to be cheaper.
For example you seem to know your way with the solutions you propose, but I already see an issue, as in reality WebM is a format limited to VP8 and VP9, and cannot contain H.264 video.
But Chrome ignored this limitation and wrote a muxer that is actually able to store H.264 inside WebM files, thus going out of spec... which means different tools might have different degrees of support for those files.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=980822
Arguably, a former user of YouTube or Vimeo shouldn't have to learn about all this, and shouldn't have to end up reading bug reports such as that one (and this is just scratching the can of worms that is all the topic of codecs, encodings, containers, etc.)
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/...
PeerTube is a piece of open source software meant to build a YouTube-like platform, with optional federation (and P2P to allow servers to offload some bandwidth to viewers, but I don't know how well this works in practice with the widespread asymmetrical or mobile internet connections). It is not for the viewer to install.
I host a PeerTube instance for my choir and I don't quite care about the existence of PeerTube instances hosting questionable content. I didn't enable federation though. Still hesitant to do this.
Maybe the current system works after all? Just don't visit those instances you dislike, this is what I do. Give people the option to choose for themselves whether they want to partake of material which you or I or my neighbour or his dog finds offending.
Imagine using WordPress to construct your website. If some page existed that listed all the sites that use WordPress, and that listed some disagreeable ones (as it surely would), that has very little impact on your usage of the software.
So, no. Either everyone is censored or no-one is. I vote for the latter, let the law decide what is allowed and keep it at that. If it isn't forbidden, it is allowed.
[1] this is not a joke, see https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/25/18234950/knitting-ra... where they seriously talk about 'Fiber artists of color' (?) pointing out the 'racism' (?) in the knitting 'community'.
The killer problem is specifically the bandwidth. There is not enough capacity to scale video over IP transit[0]; individual creators will get hosed by bandwidth costs. The way that every video platform gets around this is peering[1], but that requires lots of capital expenditure; and last-mile ISPs will play shenanigans with peering negotiations[2]. This is also why video is a monopoly market: large companies can negotiate way better bandwidth deals than you can.
Someone else mentioned PeerTube; I personally do not consider it a solution because P2P is a privacy nightmare. It's still fairly common still for vexatious litigants[3] to sue members of BitTorrent swarms to try and extort settlements out of people. Not to mention, how the heck do you handle GDPR in an environment where every one of your customers gets every other customer's IP address?
[0] What most people think of when they talk about "buying an Internet connection" - you pay someone else to route your packets.
[1] How ISPs connect to one another. You set up a link between your network and theirs, either in the form of physically wiring up extra cabling or connecting up different switches in a colocation center. That link then carries all the traffic between you and them (and either side's transit customers).
This saves money over transit, if you have lots of traffic between you and that ISP.
[2] Notably, Comcast refused to upgrade their link with Level-3 because Netflix was one of their customers
[3] Also regular copyright holders too, but usually they give up once they get a DMCA takedown processed.
A typical content creator is unlikely to have enough demand for their videos to congest IP transit links.
IP transit is also very,very cheap. At scale IP transit is only about 5 cents per Mbps.
Source: built and operated a global CDN in-house
Looks like someone built a solution awfully quickly!
If not, just put it behind a cloudflare or amazon cloudfront proxy and you can stream unlimited videos very cheap (probably in 4k i guess). Also for most cases it works best to use the KISS <video controls> tag instead of any silly skins that make users think.
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
for selfhosting your own videos that should be sufficient.
If you are hosting only your own content it's pretty easy. Once you put that upload link on the site it gets a lot more complicated.
Also funnily enough, Vimeo uses Mux (their analytics offering Mux Data, but still pretty crazy).
Yes, Reddit is a customer, but they use Data (our quality of service analytics tool), not Video (our suite of video streaming APIs). So...it's our fault if they don't have visibility into you having a bad time, but we aren't in a place to actually fix it quite yet :)
I'll be giving the Mux streaming API a try for my next project.
The question is whether one can help those customers grow, and if not, avoid the bait/switch/shock paradigm of Vimeo.
How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a better model that could scale with them?
Most of them, and I kind of suspect that most creators already do.
I've been involved in a half dozen different video distribution projects, mostly in the education and non-profit spaces and mostly in the last couple of years (for obvious reasons).
In all but one case, we just threw some <video> tags into a free static site template and hosted the videos themselves directly on the same VPS hosting the static site.
In the other case, a single server probably wouldn't have scaled, so we had... gasp... TWO VPSs. (Didn't even bother with a software load balancer... just did it by hand by giving out different urls to different groups).
Uploading videos to youtube et al. didn't even occur to us. But then, we were hosting content for an audience that was already seeking us out because of who we were independent of the video content, so we didn't need the discoverability aspect.
I suspect this still describes the vast majority of high-quality content hosting, even if the influencer economy or whatever gets the majority of attention. And I'd be surprised if many folks bother uploading those videos to youtube et al
It's like the rest of the economy. There are some behemoths that everyone pays attention to, but a huge fraction of economic activity is a small handful of folks with a truck/storefont/field.
The unlimited 4K bandwidth is not... unlimited.
I get the AWS is terrible, charges too much etc. But after being burnt, repeatedly, by unlimited offerings elsewhere, at some point it's just worth paying their storage price or whatever and just know they will be very unlikely to bait and switch you on pricing.
Yes, I'm looking at your unlimited backup storage data plans deals, your "lifetime" offers, your unmetered / unlimited (but wildly oversubscribed and/or we'll give you a call if you actually spin up 20 instances and max transfer on each).
Did I miss something or does the blog not link to the new platform?
Took me a minute to find it again because their visited link color is the same as the text color
I work at AE, and we've actually been meaning to fix that for a while, but for some reason we prioritized making another theme of our blog that looks just like pg's blog (https://ae.studio/blog/victims-of-vimeo#pg) instead of making links that people realize are links.
I think we were trying to not be too promotional or something, but we should probably fix this, and we will now!
YouTube is okay at this; TikTok is excellent at it. TikTok provides the fyp, community management, authoring and captioning tools, access to thousands of sound/music clips to use where they're handling the legal side, etc. Ostensibly this is very, very "creator-friendly", but only for a fairly specific niche of TikTok-like content, and only if you're not skirting the line of what they'll censor.
Vimeo has always felt to me more like a larger Vidyard— the content is 100% on you, but they'll handle the technical side as far as encoding and distributing, and give you a clean player widget you can embed on your own site.
That doesn't mean that a considerable amount of non-tech or low-tech (for certain definitions of low) people wouldn't rely on the actual tech expertise in terms of encodings, poster frames, subtitles, chapter marks, time-coded comments or similar things.
But if the "creator" in this scenario is khaby.lame or kallmekris, a service that helps them host their own videos on their own site is of zero use; those are social media personalities who take the hosting and technical side for granted— their primary need is exposure to a gigantic audience.
A bit like soundcloud for video.
Erm, aren't those exactly opposed?
"Drift along" as long as you are profitable is the definition of sustainable, no?
"Attracting too much audience" is anathema to sustainable if you can't maintain reliability or profitability in the face of the flood.
That's because they don't charge content creators; as it's a pay to play only platform, they make money from the individuals that subscribe to you. The amount you charge is up to you, though they only list the minimum once you have an account.