Comment by aamoscodes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aamoscodes | Hacker News Reader

...but I'm not a great developer

Yet*. You already shipped something which is more than many people can say. I understand not wanting to be a developer, I had similar thoughts for a long time, but knowing the tools and concepts developers use is helpful. Especially in situations like this. Also, it's usually not as complex as it seems from the outside. I'll be the first to admit: I spent a long time thinking I wasn't "smart enough" to do it, until I did it. If you'd like any introductory resources on how APIs work, how they can help you, how to use them, etc, let me know.

Pep talk aside I recommend price matching several different platforms:

- AWS Elemental

- Brightcove

- Bitmovin

- Cloudflare Stream (as mentioned)

- Cloudinary

- Mux[0]

- Wowza

- many, many others

The options above will give you the most control over the process, they'll host and handle streaming/delivery to any variety of users. If you'd like a managed offering you could try something like Uscreen.

Right now it seems like you're in the "get it to work" stage but at some point, you might want to integrate observability or data monitoring to track your user's experience, video performance, engagement, and other items. This is where doing a little bit of research gets you a ton of value further down the line. I recommend looking up terms like "QoE" and "QoS"[1] to get some more context.

[0]: for some context on video generally - https://howvideo.works

[1]: https://ottverse.com/beginners-guide-to-video-qoe-and-qos

Hey!

Thank you for the extremely thoughtful answer. You hit everything right in the head!

I don't mind coding but I like you might've surmised from my post, I don't feel that capable. Frontend js and doing stuff in the browser that isn't just plain html and css, goes mostly over my head.

Stuff on the server end is a bit easier to grok for me, as long as I can find semi-relevant examples to base my working on :)

I did look at most of the services you mentioned. Obviously, the hardest part is going to be estimating usage. Do I want to pay per video minute, gigabyte or simply by the number of videos?

I did test out Cloudflare Stream and it's almost perfect and the pricing is obviously very attractive. The only thing missing was any ability to sort and manage the videos uploaded unless I work over the API.

I did find Bunny.net which seems like an even better alternative with a lot of more nice-to-haves compared to Cloudflare so I think I'm mostly sorted on that end.

Thank you for your offer. I just might take you up on it when the need inevitably rises :)

You are going to want to use the API and store video metadata in a database.

With your own database of assets it’s possible to change services down the road without as much hassle.

I'd be surprised if this topic hasn't been covered on HN in the past, if not I'm sure it'll show up one day. When your role is "non-technical" (not my favorite term but using it for clarity), UI, CMS, and dialogue menus seem like the best solution. Why wouldn't I want to just point and click?

But the day I learned how to run a GET request, parse data, save it somewhere, analyze it later; my outlook completely flipped. Whenever I google "[organization] api" and get 0 official results I become irrationally angry. All this to say, I hope they approach the topic before it becomes a hard requirement, because it's a fun and useful skill to have even outside of work.

I don't mind wrangling data in the CLI, and I have written a few scripts that do utilise some APIs, like a dynamic dns type script that runs on my home server and updates Netlify's DNS to point a list of subdomains to my home network, but I'm hesitant to build anything too complex for work because when I do leave, it'll all come tumbling down :)

I try to build our processes so that our non-tech HR/management department can keep everything running eventually. Spinning up a Docker image or deploying builds to a CI pipeline is a bit out of their job description and skill set hah.

Disclaimer: I work at Mux (late edit, still learning HN etiquette)

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