Ask HN: How to get started on creating a streaming service?

I don't know much about the space other than RTMP being a popular format. The source of youtube-dl might be an interesting place to start: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_d...

If you're thinking of creating a streaming business, you better have a good business model because it's notoriously hard to create a streaming business that brings in enough revenue to cover bandwidth costs.

If your content isn't particularly controversial and you care more about the business and product side of things rather than boring engineering then just go with Cloudflare Stream (or similar products like Mux or Bitmovin, plenty of choices out there). For real-time, WebRTC is quite popular (and there are also infrastructure providers like Daily.co). The engineering of video streaming is not particularly fun or interesting. You will be operating at a low-level with respect to both networking and video codecs. Focus on your product, you can roll something custom when you have revenue. Video compression algorithms advances are powered by the lost hopes and dreams of CS PhD students. Do not waste your time on it if you have a product to sell and a business to run.

If you are looking for a self-hosted solution, check out Streama [0] and Jellyfin [1]. I have Jellyfin running in a box at home for personal videos, and it works pretty well with very low maintenance.

[0] https://github.com/streamaserver/streama

[1] https://jellyfin.org/