Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

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Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

Personally, I prefer 720p. It's easy to play on any device, the file sizes are much smaller, and the quality is fine. I don't need 4K for most content and save it for exceptional visuals like Godfrey Reggio's Trilogy or Yojimbo — one of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen in high resolution. My preference also reduces hosting costs for platforms, at least from my account.

Social media constantly pushes high-res, addictive content, but alternatives like Fediverse exist. After adjusting to these communities, I deleted my X account and rarely use Facebook. On Fediverse, server operators encourage efficient file sizes (and types,) unlike Instagram or TikTok.

The network effect drives people to the few social networks, but I'm not convinced people actually want what they're being given. Repeating for emphasis: I'm not convinced this is what people want!

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

That's what Peertube is for. The original video comes from a specific web site. If the viewer count goes up, the people watching it also stream it out. So a hugely popular video won't overload the source server.

This is not like Bittorrent. It's not distributed file storage, just distributed streaming. It's only a load on the viewer's system when they are watching the video. Now that there are large numbers of users with symmetrical network connections, this is a practical way to distribute video.

I put technical videos on Peertube because there are no commercial interruptions.[1] I recommend it for content which doesn't need "discovery" service - that is, users arrive from some other source than the hosting site.

[1] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

> Hosting video is expensive; a Twitch streamer (Thor) mentioned that an 8-hour stream at 1080p with 8,000 viewers costs Twitch nearly $5,000, while 720p still costs around $1,300.

This sounds way too much - prohibitive, in fact, when cheap all-you-can-eat dubiously-legal IPTV services exist.

On the one hand, AWS quote something similar as an estimate ($12,000 for 10 hours for 10,000 viewers at 1080p) [0]. All but a rounding error of this is paid to AWS CloudFront for per-GB distribution costs and this assumes 99% of bits can be served by the CDN.

On the other hand, Amazon note that this is typically an overestimate because it's unlikely all your viewers will get the 1080p, and they can degrade service to some (QVBR) and pass you on the savings. Additionally, Twitch video content (disproportionately, video games) seems like it should be more compressible than most video. And most importantly, Twitch don't pay the retail price.

Still, it's going to come in an order of magnitude above what I thought Youtube/Twitch etc needed to pay their bills.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/solutions/latest/live-streaming-...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0

my source for the part you quoted - apparently this is in their dashboard? it could be a third party site. I no longer have access to a twitch account (as an aside i blame starlink and not using gmail) so i can't verify if streamers on the platform have access to those tools.

And the pricing seemed about right. You can't tell but i am napkin-ing this right now: twitch recommends 4500kbps for 1080p30 on the uplink side, which fans out to 40gbit. per second. So maybe you can get that for $5000/month; or you can get 10gbit links in four places. Receive bits, transcode, stream. how hard

wait transcode?

A certain very large media company was paying a third party $250,000 per month for transcoding, on three 24x7 streams. I'm not saying that spend was necessary, because it isn't, just that it is a pain point.

anyhow that video shows $0.132 per half-viewer-hour (or something) at 1080p - probably 60fps. Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

> Come to think of it that's suspiciously close to what i'd guess AWS would charge for transit (which you alluded to, i think) - so this is showing streamers what they would be paying if they self hosted?

It was always going to be something like that. It's unlikely Amazon/Twitch wants to reveal exactly its costs. In general, people complain that egress bandwidth seems to be a high-margin line item for AWS.

Many 'dubious-legal IPTV services' will use stolen or trial AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, etc accounts for their CDN and when the account gets locked they just spring up another account.

So the cloud providers tend to be the one's paying and consequently their legitimate customers pay.

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