
Ask HN: What kind of infrastructure is needed for a video sharing service? - dragonbonheur
I know Netflix and Twitch used Amazon&#x27;s servers, but what kind of operating costs are to be expected for this kind of service? For a whole year of operation?<p>Or if one is to have a service to share up to 3 minutes of videos max, what kind of costs does one have to expect, per year of operation? Should one use the same CDN provided by the hosting service or use Akamai like Facebook?<p>And what are the data centers and CDNs that are interesting for small to medium video sharing startups?<p>How does Azure compare to Amazon? Does anybody know about any relevant and interesting whitepapers out there?
======
stephengillie
With a video sharing service, you have large amounts of data transfer, and
data storage. You're basically pushing large BLObs around your servers and to
your users.

If you have a relatively simple page, you could get by with low compute -
you're just transferring HTML, CSS, and the binary. HTML5 video players are
simple and easy to find, I've done it in just a few lines for a demo. I
actually had more problems converting the video than getting the HTML5 player
to work.

What resolution would that 3 minutes of video be? That might impact your
plans. And how many people do you expect to see a single 3 minute video?
Multiply the video size (in MB) by the number of expected downloads to get an
idea of the bandwidth for that video. Multiply that bandwidth by the number of
videos to get an idea for how much bandwidth you'll need for the whole site.
Of course page loads and overhead will add to that, I'm not sure exactly how
much but I'd add 20% to your bandwidth estimates just so you have some spare
bandwidth.

You should absolutely look into CDNs. They reduce the load on your servers
while getting stuff to your users faster. I think Cloudflare might have a free
tier, and other CDNs might too.

Azure isn't as well-known as Amazon; if you're expecting to be able to Google
blog posts when you have problems, I'd go with Amazon. And there are other
cloud hosts, ranging from nearly Azure size, to much smaller.

You might choose a lower-cost more-distant datacenter, and a low-cost or free
CDN, to start your MVP. If you're interested in using .NET or IIS, then look
into Bizspark.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Thanks for your answer. I was more curious about what kind of costs are
associated with apps like Periscope, Mixvid or Vine rather than simple web
pages, but thanks again for taking the time to provide an answer.

------
trcollinson
At a recent startup I was helping with we had a video and image service. We
utilized the video storage from both youtube and vimeo rather than hosting it
ourselves. The application itself was more in line with a Vine or Periscope
(in fact, a lot like Periscope).

As part of our agreement with youtube and vimeo we had to handle some video
processing. We had about 300,000 users, spread across just about every
continent. We ran 12 front end web servers, 10 processing servers, a mongo
cluster, used s3 storage, and Amazon CloudFront for CDN. Our bill for those
300,000 users was about $12,000 a month. Again, we did not actually STORE the
videos, we allows youtube and vimeo to do that.

The price also did not scale as one might imagine. The more users you have the
higher the cost per user gets. This is because the more users you have, the
more traffic you seem to get to each video and so bandwidth, which was by far
the highest cost, would go up quite a lot.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Thanks for replying. Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw
fit? Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Or strip Youtube's ads
and place your own in the metadata? Or did you have another way to monetize?

~~~
trcollinson
Well yes and no. That is a very complex question and one that might be better
for an actual conversation. Youtube and Vimeo want to make money. They don't
take kindly to you hitting their revenue streams which are, generally, ads.
However, they do work with people very well, though it is slow and
bureaucratic. So to give you the simple answers:

Was it possible for you to monetize the videos as you saw fit? Hell no. But it
was possible for us to monetize the videos.

Were you allowed to place your own ads with them? Yes

Or strip Youtube's ads and place your own in the metadata? We worked with them
to accomplish something like this yes.

Or did you have another way to monetize? Yes, this too :)

We made a bit of money on this system we built and it was more or less self
sustaining. The issue was that it actually wasn't that profitable. We had
another product which was almost like a little helper we made internally for
ourselves that turned out to be a TON more lucrative so we gave up on the
video and image network and eventually shut it down. Sometimes you have to
just know when to fold them.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Wow. That was a great and helpful answer. Thanks again.

------
dragonbonheur
[Update] Used Bing and found those articles. I'll add more when I find more of
them.

[https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to-
start-...](https://gigaom.com/2010/03/19/how-much-did-it-cost-to-start-
youtube/)

[http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-
monetization-s...](http://www.wired.com/2014/01/secret-snapchats-monetization-
success-will-surprise/)

[http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-
worlds-h...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/12/02/much-cost-build-worlds-
hottest-startups/)

[http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live-
stream-46092521](http://www.slideshare.net/gwendal/live-stream-46092521)

