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Comment by akurilin | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for responding. The reason why we're trying to switch to having someone else host these videos is mainly bandwidth costs. Storage is super cheap, streaming that data out to the Internet, not so much apparently. We currently store our videos in S3 and pipe 10ish TBs a month, and this number is growing very rapidly (and very linearly) every month. At $0.09/GB data transfer out cost, this is pretty pricey, and the reason why we're trying to move off of hosting them ourselves. Maybe there's a cheaper offering than hosting on AWS, I'm open to ideas.

Vimeo and YouTube allow you to not pay for bandwidth, which is great, so they seem like the way to go if we're optimizing for that. The API idea for vimeo is pretty interesting, I'll have to investigate. Alternatively there's always task rabbit.. :)

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I totally understand! The outbound can get pricey. The thing with moving to a vimeo or YouTube is you are giving up some control for the reduced price. They will add ads around your videos. They have rules about how you can display them. I have been in scenarios where I have been shut down by YouTube. So there is that to keep in mind.

However, I have had some good success with vimeo and their pro level accounts but they aren't all cheap. They do have absolutely fantastic api support!

You might also look into reserve instance pricing on cloudfront. They will give you quite discount for the commitment.

Awesome, thanks for clarifying. I hadn't thought about ads, that'd be somewhat disruptive. Our use case is somewhat similar to Khan Academy: we display help videos for students as they use the application and need assistance. It'd be embedded in our application, but still available directly on Youtube if one really wanted to access it that way.

This may be a problem better fixed by a business model than a technical change. Do you make a profit directly from the videos? If so, a change in pricing might solve most of the problem.

Would you mind sharing the reason why YouTube shut you down or a list of rules that are easy to break?

My boss is adamant to move some of our video (days of footage per project, multiple projects per year) to YouTube and I couldn't find a hard reason not to do it. Supposedly YouTube won't display ads if the videos are unlisted or private.

Honestly the rules are not well spelled out. On one project we linked to other users content and displayed all of the ads associated which YouTube wanted to add, but when the aggregate amount of content delivered became too high our ip's were blocked. When we asked them they said we were out of the terms of use. There was no way to fix it. This was in 2014, by the way, so quite recently.

There is a substantial cost to video delivery. If you try to push this onto a service to take the cost for you, it really will backfire eventually.

Thank you, that was my gut feeling as well.

Disclosure: I'm working on a video delivery network company called Dendrio (www.dendr.io).

You're pretty spot on about AWS. Storage is super cheap, but data transfer can be really expensive. Also, depending on your users' habits, you'll likely want a CDN to serve your files, especially if you want to serve international markets, and I can tell you that most CDNs are very expensive for video hosting. Third party hosting like Youtube and Vimeo have limits for how you can use them which are easy to go over while full-service video hosting/analytics/monetization like Brightcove and Ooyala will cost you a house.

Shameless self-promotion: you should check us out at dendr.io. We're working on a peer to peer CDN that runs on top of your existing hosting provider (whether you do it yourself, or a CDN) to decrease your costs and give you other benefits. Feel free to email me at "albert@" our domain.

If your only concern is the cost of bandwidth, then the solution is simple. Just move off Amazon to some other provider that does not rip you off bandwidth charges.

I'm open to suggestions. What provider offers very affordable bandwidth?

one example:

https://www.runabove.com/index.xml#storage

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