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Tell HN: Launched my first real start-up (Commerical video hosting)

15 points by podman ↗ HN
I launched my latest start-up, http://www.sproutvideo.com , on last monday. It's a discount commercial video hosting platform. I built the service in a little under three weeks because it needed to get done ASAP.

Back Story: A little over 5 months ago, I left my job at Motionbox.com. Motionbox ended up getting bought by SnapFish who had no interest in keeping any of the pro users (people hosting commercial content). So, in order to not screw over those customers, and to make a bit of money, I decided to build a comparable service and migrate over all of the users. We just started migrating users on last monday and things seem to be going well. We have about 150 users as of today.

So, if any of you need cheap commercial video hosting, you know where to go!

6 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] thread
karanbhangui
This is great. I have a contract next month with a local company looking to build a video site in their niche (elementary education tools). I'll be using this for sure :)

Do you guys have an API?

podman
Thanks! Unfortunately, I haven't had time to write an API yet. I'm the only developer, so I focused on the features that needed to be there right away for users to be able to use our service. I had just about 2 weeks to pull this together and still have a fulltime job. Almost none of them needed an API.

Building an API, however, is very high up on my list of things to do though. What kind of things would you like to see in an API? I think we have another, very large, customer who needs an API too so I'll try to get something set up ASAP.

karanbhangui
I guess for now:

- a way to directly upload a video from a file select field (http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_pro...)

- a unique identifier for the video I can then store in my database with other metadata (which user uploaded it, when, etc). If you want to expose other metadata on the video like compressed size, number of views, etc that'd be great but not yet necessary

- a standardized way to embed the videos based on the unique id (above)

organicgrant
You need to put an example embedded video prominently on your page. Does your player rule? Great!

Does it suck? I don't know. What I DO know is I wouldn't become a paying member just to find out.

podman
Yes, I completely agree. We DO need a player on the homepage.

Like I noted, however, this was a real rush job. We needed a minimum set of features so that we could migrate users and I really only had time to focus on that as opposed to the marketing material. Once we start marketing the site to new users, we will hopefully have a good intro video to show off the player.