[HN Gopher] Victims of Vimeo
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Victims of Vimeo
Author : jarrenae
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-03-21 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ae.studio)
(TXT) w3m dump (ae.studio)
| carrick__44 wrote:
| So basically this is a promotion post?
| memecatcher wrote:
| I'm not the post creator, but I'm one of the founders of
| Instill. I don't think it was intended as such as the HN crowd
| isn't really our target customer (non-technical health &
| fitness content creators who need a comprehensive / white glove
| solution to launching a subscription content platform, not
| people who can engage in a debate about the cheapest way to set
| up your own infra to stream videos haha). Ev had some
| interesting thoughts about Vimeo's huge shift which were
| informed by us having started this platform some months ago
| based in part on some pushpack from content creators on Vimeo.
| Of course, as an early startup, we will also take any attention
| we can get so I don't hate if this wound up being a little bit
| of both ;)
| [deleted]
| logifail wrote:
| > Anyone knows a creator-friendly video platform?
|
| Let's rephrase that, if you have easy access to hosting and
| [sufficient] bandwidth, can anyone recommend creator-friendly
| tooling such that you can just host _your_ content _yourself_?
|
| I'm _so done_ with relying on third parties to do a poor job
| hosting stuff I created :(
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If you have easy access to hosting and enough bandwidth, a
| <video> tag and static HTML is "good enough". If you want to
| get _really_ fancy and are willing to touch JS, you can have
| some code swap out sources based on the screen size, if the
| video buffer has run dry recently, etc.
|
| The killer problem _is_ specifically the bandwidth. There is
| not enough capacity to scale video over IP transit[0];
| individual creators will get hosed by bandwidth costs. The way
| that every video platform gets around this is peering[1], but
| that requires lots of capital expenditure; and last-mile ISPs
| will play shenanigans with peering negotiations[2]. This is
| also why video is a monopoly market: large companies can
| negotiate _way_ better bandwidth deals than you can.
|
| Someone else mentioned PeerTube; I personally do not consider
| it a solution because P2P is a privacy nightmare. It's still
| fairly common still for vexatious litigants[3] to sue members
| of BitTorrent swarms to try and extort settlements out of
| people. Not to mention, how the heck do you handle GDPR in an
| environment where every one of your customers gets _every
| other_ customer 's IP address?
|
| [0] What most people think of when they talk about "buying an
| Internet connection" - you pay someone else to route your
| packets.
|
| [1] How ISPs connect to one another. You set up a link between
| your network and theirs, either in the form of physically
| wiring up extra cabling or connecting up different switches in
| a colocation center. That link then carries all the traffic
| between you and them (and either side's transit customers).
|
| This saves money over transit, if you have lots of traffic
| between you and that ISP.
|
| [2] Notably, Comcast refused to upgrade their link with Level-3
| because Netflix was one of their customers
|
| [3] Also regular copyright holders too, but usually they give
| up once they get a DMCA takedown processed.
| iptrans wrote:
| I think you are overstating the problems of relying on IP
| transit somewhat.
|
| A typical content creator is unlikely to have enough demand
| for their videos to congest IP transit links.
|
| IP transit is also very, _very_ cheap. At scale IP transit is
| only about 5 cents per Mbps.
|
| Source: built and operated a global CDN in-house
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| If you're comfortable self-hosting, I think PeerTube is the go-
| to option. Federation is optional.
| jraph wrote:
| Well, PeerTube is not too hard to install and is quite pleasant
| to use...
|
| https://joinpeertube.org/
|
| https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/...
| zxexz wrote:
| Hmm, if you go the the instances list on joinpeertube.org,
| and hit "display" or "no opinion" on the "Sensitive Videos"
| filter, you don't have to go down more than a couple before
| seeing awful white nationalist content instances :|
| Ourgon wrote:
| zxexz wrote:
| If I may please point you to the HN Guidelines [0] (also
| linked in the footer).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Ourgon wrote:
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I don't care what's on PeerTube's front page any more than
| I care about what's on YouTube's front page (ie. not at
| all), since I always just search for what I want.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jraph wrote:
| I don't think this is that relevant. It's like saying the
| web is full of shit. It's true, but should we throw the
| baby out with the bath water?
|
| I host a PeerTube instance for my choir and I don't quite
| care about the existence of PeerTube instances hosting
| questionable content. I didn't enable federation though.
| Still hesitant to do this.
| zxexz wrote:
| Perhaps I should have added more to my comment. I love
| Peertube and it is very valuable software. I just
| question if the joinpeertube.org website shouldn't
| blacklist some of those from appearing on their website.
| Having such links there definitely wont increase the
| likelihood of your average content creator using the
| platform.
| Ourgon wrote:
| jraph wrote:
| I don't see the need to be that confrontational. Let's
| cool down a bit, I'm sure everybody means well here.
| zxexz wrote:
| I was just suggesting that they not link to white
| nationalist content their website. The website that is
| the first result of searching for "peertube" in
| duckduckgo or Google.
| Ourgon wrote:
| emerged wrote:
| This thread has been fascinating to read. Do you
| literally not see the problem with what you keep saying?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| What is the problem with what they keep saying? They
| don't want to send their would-be viewers to a site that
| promotes white nationalist content on their home page.
| Who would, besides racists and edgelords?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| It sounds like they _do_ exclude those but you
| specifically asked for the unfiltered list?
| [deleted]
| slimscsi wrote:
| If an install is necessary, you have already lost 90% of your
| viewers.
| jraph wrote:
| Viewers don't install anything. That would be the content
| creator here because the question is "as a content creator
| who wants to self host, what can I use?", but that could
| also be someone the content creator knows, or someone
| providing a PeerTube instance for content creators.
|
| PeerTube is a piece of open source software meant to build
| a YouTube-like platform, with optional federation (and P2P
| to allow servers to offload some bandwidth to viewers, but
| I don't know how well this works in practice with the
| widespread asymmetrical or mobile internet connections). It
| is not for the viewer to install.
| evancoop wrote:
| How's this for an alternative?
| (https://www.agencyovervideo.com/)
|
| Looks like someone built a solution awfully quickly!
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Internet video is stupidly simple these days, now that the
| Flash requirement is long dead: export your video in H.264 and
| WebM to cover all of your bases (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari,
| and iOS Safari all support H.264, WebM is supported by Firefox,
| Chrome, Edge, Safari on MacOS 11.3 or later, Safari on iOS 15
| or later and Android Chrome.) Then you can just upload it to an
| S3/CloudFront bucket and slap a <video> tag on literally any
| web site. It's basically as simple as serving images these
| days. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...
|
| Most of your garden variety blog/CMS engines have plugins that
| can even automatically take media uploads and stash them on
| Amazon or a similar CDN. For something that's not even that
| big, that might even be overkill. If the amount of data
| transferred monthly is low enough, you could probably just
| serve it off a VPS.
| jraph wrote:
| This is probably not quite enough in many cases. You may need
| a search engine that indexes your videos, a comment section,
| a way to refer to sections of the videos, something that
| provides several versions / qualities so the video can be
| viewed on any internet connection but still be available in
| high quality when this is possible, adaptive streaming, and
| many other things I'm not thinking of. All that in a user
| interface optimized for videos.
|
| You can probably implement a part of these features
| imperfectly in a regular CMS and with the video tag, but you
| may as well use readily-available software that do this job
| for you well.
|
| If you host, occasionally, one or two videos, that's probably
| the best thing to do, but if you are to create a channel, you
| are probably better of using dedicated software.
| xwdv wrote:
| And of course, people always forget about accessibility for
| those with disabilities. Everyone making their own half
| baked video solutions creating a more user-hostile web for
| the disabled.
| matvp wrote:
| That's a very primitive approach. Once you're dealing with
| adaptive formats (DASH, HLS) containing multiple renditions
| (different bitrates) and/or codecs, it gets more complicated.
| I get that a single h264 codec/mp4 (webm) container file is
| easy enough as it is widely supported but once you're dealing
| with larger video's and getting them served over different
| connection types/speeds, it gets trickier. Atleast with
| services like Vimeo/YouTube, you don't have to bother too
| much.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Well, that's what they sell. Vimeo charges reasonably for
| transcoding and storing all these different versions of
| videos. YouTube does it for free to stifle competition and
| stay the only place advertisers can go if they want a
| captive audience (with TikTok and Facebook, both also free,
| being their only real competitors).
|
| If I had to actually recommend a service it'd be Cloudflare
| Stream[0], which allows you to upload videos, CF transcodes
| them, and you get a link to a page with just the video
| player[1], and they offer options like only allowing embeds
| on certain origins and disabling/enabling MP4 downloads.
| The pricing is fairly reasonable as well at $1 per 1,000
| watch minutes and $5 per 1,000 minutes of stored video.
|
| 0: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
|
| 1: https://watch.videodelivery.net/b9d528d5eece459b80113823
| cefd...
| evancoop wrote:
| The idea here is that there are certainly costs of storage and
| streaming. And there are certainly SOME customers that probably
| aren't optimal to serve.
|
| The question is whether one can help those customers grow, and if
| not, avoid the bait/switch/shock paradigm of Vimeo.
|
| How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a better
| model that could scale with them?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> How many domain-specific creators would benefit from a
| better model that could scale with them? _
|
| Most of them, and I kind of suspect that most creators already
| do.
|
| I've been involved in a half dozen different video distribution
| projects, mostly in the education and non-profit spaces and
| mostly in the last couple of years (for obvious reasons).
|
| In all but one case, we just threw some <video> tags into a
| free static site template and hosted the videos themselves
| directly on the same VPS hosting the static site.
|
| In the other case, a single server probably wouldn't have
| scaled, so we had... _gasp_... _TWO_ VPSs. (Didn 't even bother
| with a software load balancer... just did it by hand by giving
| out different urls to different groups).
|
| Uploading videos to youtube et al. didn't even occur to us. But
| then, we were hosting content for an audience that was already
| seeking us out because of who we were independent of the video
| content, so we didn't need the discoverability aspect.
|
| I suspect this still describes the vast majority of high-
| quality content hosting, even if the influencer economy or
| whatever gets the majority of attention. And I'd be surprised
| if many folks bother uploading those videos to youtube et al
|
| It's like the rest of the economy. There are some behemoths
| that everyone pays attention to, but a huge fraction of
| economic activity is a small handful of folks with a
| truck/storefont/field.
| superasn wrote:
| Digitalocean spaces is $5 for 250 GB while Contabo offers the
| same for $2.49 / mo. I'm sure there are others too. I think DO
| also offers a free CDN with edge caching.
|
| If not, just put it behind a cloudflare or amazon cloudfront
| proxy and you can stream unlimited videos very cheap (probably in
| 4k i guess). Also for most cases it works best to use the KISS
| <video controls> tag instead of any silly skins that make users
| think.
|
| (1) https://contabo.com/en/object-storage/
| em-bee wrote:
| hetzner servers are at around $50/month but with 1Gbit link you
| get unlimited traffic:
|
| https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/
|
| for selfhosting your own videos that should be sufficient.
| phonon wrote:
| AWS Lightsail is a full server with 2 TB of data transfer for
| $5/m.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/
| systemvoltage wrote:
| We can start YouTube competitor with your enthusiasm alone and
| bypass all the T&C violations.
| jandrese wrote:
| And then get sued to death by media cartels and carted off to
| jail for hosting child porn.
|
| If you are hosting only your own content it's pretty easy.
| Once you put that upload link on the site it gets a lot more
| complicated.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Even hosting your own content, it cannot sustain any
| reasonable virality. Any widespread consumption requires a
| giant buffer of Big Tech with deep pockets.
| schainks wrote:
| Is Nebula a good fit for creator-friendly video platform?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Nebula requires a subscription to view, it's no more "creator-
| friendly" than cable television.
| xwdv wrote:
| My suggestion is just get a smaller audience. Have paid
| subscriptions for content.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Is this not what the entire talk about this issue has been?
| mikysco wrote:
| "With this in mind, a few months ago, our company, AE assembled a
| subscription video platform for health and fitness"
|
| Did I miss something or does the blog not link to the new
| platform?
| bdougherty wrote:
| Yeah the link is there with the text "subscription video
| platform": https://instillvideo.com/
|
| Took me a minute to find it again because their visited link
| color is the same as the text color
| mikysco wrote:
| Ah good catch! Yeah the hyperlink color was the same as text
| for me, too
| kvee wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out!
|
| I work at AE, and we've actually been meaning to fix that
| for a while, but for some reason we prioritized making
| another theme of our blog that looks just like pg's blog
| (https://ae.studio/blog/victims-of-vimeo#pg) instead of
| making links that people realize are links.
|
| I think we were trying to not be too promotional or
| something, but we should probably fix this, and we will
| now!
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Yeah so what is their pricing?
| memecatcher wrote:
| Right now our pricing is $1/user, but with a minimum of $500.
| We're considering adding a self service option at a lower
| price point (as this definitely prices out some potential
| customers), but right now we only offer very white-glove
| service for our customers and its not economically viable for
| us to cater to smaller customers with the level of dedication
| we want to deliver to each of them. We have a dedicated
| account manager for all our customers, offer iOS and Android
| apps released under the customer organizations, develop
| features for the platform based on customer requests, help
| with migration and design, etc. It's interesting that Vimeo
| is also now not catering to smaller creators, as its
| something we decided not to focus on also for viability
| reasons early on and instead double down on providing a
| better platform for a higher price point. Vimeo's decision
| also makes me reconsider if we should allow a cheaper self
| service option on Instill - the thing I worry about is that
| given variable costs like streaming we'd have to cover, we'd
| still need to charge some amount that people didn't feel was
| "cheap" and so they would expect some greater value to
| accompany the offering that we wouldn't be able to deliver
| (ex. we wouldn't be able to have as fast support or an AM
| help them set up their offering, etc.)
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Anyone knows a creator-friendly video platform?
| alexrsagen wrote:
| Floatplane? Linus and Luke at Linus Tech Tips (some of the
| people behind the service) always say it was made for creators.
| bsder wrote:
| I don't see pricing on Floatplane. Lack of pricing is a non-
| starter.
| Elidrake42 wrote:
| https://www.floatplane.com/support
|
| That's because they don't charge content creators; as it's
| a pay to play only platform, they make money from the
| individuals that subscribe to you. The amount you charge is
| up to you, though they only list the minimum once you have
| an account.
| rwmj wrote:
| Is it sustainable long term if it drifts along without either
| making much money or attracting much audience?
| bsder wrote:
| > Is it sustainable long term if it drifts along without
| either making much money or attracting much audience?
|
| Erm, aren't those exactly opposed?
|
| "Drift along" as long as you are profitable is the
| _definition_ of sustainable, no?
|
| "Attracting too much audience" is anathema to sustainable
| if you can't maintain reliability or profitability in the
| face of the flood.
| rwmj wrote:
| I maybe didn't phrase it well, but I'm talking about
| companies that make just enough money to sustain
| themselves but never quite grow nor go out of business.
| (I founded one and it wasn't very much fun. We eventually
| killed it, but it was never unprofitable). Anyhow it
| seems like floatplane hasn't made much of an impact -
| it's not huge like Youtube or growing massively - so does
| it have long term prospects?
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| That's such a broad criteria that it's next to impossible to
| give good recommendations. What does that mean? Could you make
| a list of requirements that would make one platform more
| "creator-friendly" than another?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think one of the biggest key questions is, how much do you
| need/want the platform to assist with authoring, engagement,
| and discovery?
|
| YouTube is okay at this; TikTok is excellent at it. TikTok
| provides the fyp, community management, authoring and
| captioning tools, access to thousands of sound/music clips to
| use where they're handling the legal side, etc. Ostensibly
| this is very, very "creator-friendly", but only for a fairly
| specific niche of TikTok-like content, and only if you're not
| skirting the line of what they'll censor.
|
| Vimeo has always felt to me more like a larger Vidyard-- the
| content is 100% on you, but they'll handle the technical side
| as far as encoding and distributing, and give you a clean
| player widget you can embed on your own site.
| atoav wrote:
| Embedding a HTML5 video player with some javascript on top
| is quite trivial. I think the actual, reliable, fast and
| somewhat affordable global distribution of video streams is
| the actual meat of the problem from the perspective of
| someone who would eventually just self-host.
|
| That doesn't mean that a considerable amount of non-tech or
| low-tech (for certain definitions of low) people wouldn't
| rely on the actual tech expertise in terms of encodings,
| poster frames, subtitles, chapter marks, time-coded
| comments or similar things.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Sure, but that comes back to who the "creator" is in this
| scenario and what their actual needs are. Embeddable
| video hosting might be perfect for an e-learning site, or
| an indie film studio, or someone providing paid online
| music lessons, or whatever.
|
| But if the "creator" in this scenario is khaby.lame or
| kallmekris, a service that helps them host their own
| videos on their own site is of zero use; those are social
| media personalities who take the hosting and technical
| side for granted-- their primary need is exposure to a
| gigantic audience.
| atoav wrote:
| For which Vimeo was never the golden choice before. Most
| people I know who pay for vimeo are film makers who need
| hosting, sometimws for piblic stuff, sometimes with a
| password for preview purposes.
|
| A bit like soundcloud for video.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| How many of the problems plaguing the modern web could be solved
| by universal computer literacy -- teaching folks, along with
| typing and Word/Powerpoint/Excel -- how to host a static website
| that holds text/photos/video.
| memecatcher wrote:
| Definitely would help a lot. Although I'm not sure we can
| expect everyone to develop the simplest next step of literacy
| that creators might need here- having that site also be able to
| have user accounts, charge users, restrict access
| appropriately. Since these things are pretty universal, I do
| also think the no-code space is attempting to meet people
| halfway there -- letting people do stuff on their own with
| basic literacy without having to reinvent the wheel each time
| requiring some deeper (even if still basic) knowledge. Of
| course some centralized solutions do have predatory pricing to
| take advantage of the fact that many people need that
| abstraction layer, but I suspect the problem is also two fold -
| running the quick math on some of the example creators about to
| be kicked off of Vimeo, I suspect many of them would find the
| costs of running this service (especially if they wanted "good"
| streaming) themselves to be expensive also, not counting the
| additional time that would be required of them even if they
| could do it.
| briandoll wrote:
| Surprised nobody mentioned Mux yet, who are really great at
| providing a video platform for all sorts of apps and businesses:
| https://mux.com/
| memecatcher wrote:
| Mux is awesome. We are using Mux for Instill. Super reliable
| and by far the most developer friendly option we found. There
| is ways to do it cheaper for sure, but when evaluating all the
| time spent setting up and maintaining all the infra required to
| do that (especially since we want to get as close to zero
| downtime, working on almost all device types, fast global
| delivery, wanted to get Instill up and running fast etc.) we
| decided it was well worth the cost.
|
| Also funnily enough, Vimeo uses Mux (their analytics offering
| Mux Data, but still pretty crazy).
| pg5 wrote:
| Doesn't Reddit use Mux? Reddit's video player is atrocious. I'm
| not sure whether it is the fault of Reddit or Mux though.
| mmcclure wrote:
| (Mux founder here)
|
| Yes, Reddit is a customer, but they use Data (our quality of
| service analytics tool), not Video (our suite of video
| streaming APIs). So...it's our fault if they don't have
| visibility into you having a bad time, but we aren't in a
| place to actually fix it quite yet :)
| tempnow987 wrote:
| This is a story as old as the internet.
|
| The unlimited 4K bandwidth is not... unlimited.
|
| I get the AWS is terrible, charges too much etc. But after being
| burnt, repeatedly, by unlimited offerings elsewhere, at some
| point it's just worth paying their storage price or whatever and
| just know they will be very unlikely to bait and switch you on
| pricing.
|
| Yes, I'm looking at your unlimited backup storage data plans
| deals, your "lifetime" offers, your unmetered / unlimited (but
| wildly oversubscribed and/or we'll give you a call if you
| actually spin up 20 instances and max transfer on each).
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