
Ask HN: How to get started on creating a streaming service? - ooppqq
Hi all, Ive been looking around for a technical explanation of how video streaming works and cant really come up with anything. If anyone has any links or sources that can help id appreciate it.<p>Thanks
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sansnomme
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.

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Raed667
Jumping on the thread here, but do you happen to have a larger list of (non-
branded) video hosting/streaming services?

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shakkhar
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](https://github.com/streamaserver/streama)

[1] [https://jellyfin.org/](https://jellyfin.org/)

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statquontrarian
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...](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/downloader/rtmp.py)

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.

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mataniko
RTMP is a mostly dead streaming format for live content....

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statquontrarian
Thanks, what are the newer formats?

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codegladiator
[https://github.com/nareix/joy4/](https://github.com/nareix/joy4/)

