Ask HN: How expensive is it to host and stream video? Hi folks, I'm thinking of launching a site that deals directly with uploading, hosting, and streaming videos. I was wondering what the cost for this would like? |
Ask HN: How expensive is it to host and stream video? Hi folks, I'm thinking of launching a site that deals directly with uploading, hosting, and streaming videos. I was wondering what the cost for this would like? |
If you want to build a video platform from scratch, your cost models are going to be dominated by the combination of data egress and CDN costs. Transcode and storage costs are non-trivial, but do quickly become noise against delivery costs.
As CyberFonic mentioned, AWS has a variety of media products, which for transcode and storage work well, but then to deliver you'll need a CDN to deliver the content. The simplest way of doing this is to just hook up CloudFront, but the list prices for CloudFront are very high ($0.085/GB in the US), you'll be able to negotiate this down, but Cloudfront isn't actually a great CDN performance wise (particularly outside the US), and eventually you'll want to use a multi-CDN strategy for performance and reliability reasons.
Then comes the second hit, if you store your content in AWS and need to egress to a third party CDN, you can be paying very high data rates on that data transfer, particularly in regions such as Asia and Australia / NZ.
Now, honestly, if you're small and have a lot of time to invest, go for it, it's an amazing learning experience, you can learn a lot about how streaming video works on these sites and playlists:
https://howvideo.works/ https://awesome.video/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIc_DkRxo9UgUSTvWVNCmpA
Honestly, my recommendation is to focus on content, and user experience, and utilise modern off-the-shelf video services, like:
Mux - https://mux.com - An API first video infrastructure provider (Disclaimer: I work here) Cloufdlare Stream - https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/cloudflare-stream/
I do have some additional feature request for mux like restricting by IP or http_referrer etc as a nice to have but otherwise, it is solid.
A closer competitor that I evaluated is Cloudflare stream but they are a bit more abstract than mux. So less controls on the player etc compared to mux where you come up with your own player.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/live-streaming-on-aws/
and
https://aws.amazon.com/mediaconvert/pricing/
Assuming you trial a MVP using AWS those two pages might give you some indication of ball park costs.
If you are looking at co-lo provisioning then you will probably need to plunk down in the order of USD10,000 to USD50,000 to test the waters.
Either way, in the long term I think your per minute per connection costs will probably be in the order of the AWS costings. After all, they do that sort of thing on a massive scale and have a great deal of experience.
Good luck with your planned venture.
Since additional details were requested, I'all add them.
I'm not quite sure how many users this will pickup, it depends on how on demand the site is, but I do YouTube / Twitch reliability and quality.
I can't quite say much more as I haven't fully thought through all the details, as I just want to put my foot into the water and know how much money it would take, before I invest any time.
if you outgrow that, you'll have better ideas / data on what you want to do and how to get there. You'll also be able to see if you can monetize enough to scale up bandwidth. You should have plenty of test the waters with 20TB a month I would think.
ymmv.
there are some similar options, but after doing some of these, this is where I'd start :)
be prepped for handling dmca contacts, and such or things spiral quickly. I've dabbled in this area for years.