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Comment by trcollinson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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