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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

I think youtube's hegemony is past; it WAS the main point to upload your videos at some point because storage and bandwidth was expensive, and on-demand video conversion difficult and resource-intensive. But nowadays anyone can host videos on a $5/month shared server, with software to handle things like video conversion.

Youtube pivoted from "just" hosting videos to a community though, to the point where you won't get any views unless you are on youtube and play by their rules and network effects.

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Depends on the videos, I think if you want someone to watch your 1080p@60fps without stutter like they do on youtube anywhere in the world you need edge architecture designed for video no? If so, I'd like to know the service which can do that for $5.

For static video you pretty much just need to serve it in a format browsers support with the correct MIME types, and make sure you have enough bandwidth.

Where it gets hairy is when you want to do live streaming…

Any suggested tech stack for this? I posted a similar question to this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34384732

> tech stack

linux?

a $5 vps running any webserver and an sftp client on your phone will do.

This really doesn't work very well for a great many users.

You can have all the bandwidth in the world, but the magic that Youtube does is mainly dealing with the users' bandwidth, for example, it switches video resolution on the fly when it notices that frames are going to have to be dropped soon.

If only browsers would natively support adaptive quality video streaming. Perhaps we should ask the biggest browser vendor to implement that, surely they won't have any conflict of interest there.

No, that sort of thing only matters if you're going to have a lot of people watching the video.

This severly underestimates the resources required to serve video to even small audiences.

Depends on the resolution. For short-ish clips with reasonable sizes it is not that much at all - as can be seen with the Fediverse as well as commercial social networks all having their own video hosting.

Hosting isn't the important part. Discoverability is.

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