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Ask HN: Which video hosting services scale well?

7 points by akurilin ↗ HN
Hey folks.

I'm looking for a video hosting service along the lines of YouTube and Vimeo that would allow our company to hosts a couple of thousand educational videos. The biggest challenge is being able to easily edit and categorize these videos, since there are so many of them.

Several of the UIs for video management seem to work well if you have a dozen of them, but once you get into the thousands, things get pretty tricky.

At that point you pretty much want a filesystem-like UX that's specifically built for bulk editing, moving, renaming etc. Haven't stumbled upon anything quite like that though.

Cheers.

15 comments

[ 18.1 ms ] story [ 1228 ms ] thread
trcollinson
I have quite a bit of experience in the video and image hosting space (one really really big company, one very successful start-up) and I can say safely you have two options, neither will be cheap. There are probably other options. This is a large and complex requirement, keep that in mind.

First off, you can get a pro vimeo account and with access to the api you can upload and maintain the videos in the ways you want, but you will probably need to create a custom application to access that api and handle things appropriately for your business. All in all this may be a good solution, it depends on how you want to display these videos to your users.

Alternatively, it's gotten to a point where you can actually host and maintain these yourself without a video storage service. Storage has become exceptional inexpensive. There are fantastic tools for displaying the videos. Then it's just up to your organization to make the interface for management how you'd like.

angersock
What, just like throw the videos up on s3 or something similar?
akurilin
See my response next to yours.
trcollinson
Well, depending on how many videos you are storing, yes. Let's imagine 6000 minutes of 1080p video at ~8.2mb per minute. That would come out to 50gb of storage for that 100 hours of video. This would cost $1.00 - $1.50 per month for storage. You'll have other charges for the get calls but with a cdn it can be quite reasonable. It depends entirely on your business needs. Frankly the application to deliver this successfully to your customers will be the more costly part. But again, I have delivered some amazing video experiences to customers on custom built solutions with very very high profit margins.
akurilin
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.. :)

trcollinson
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.

akurilin
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.
trcollinson
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.
alt_
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.

trcollinson
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.

alt_
Thank you, that was my gut feeling as well.
albertyw
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.