

Ask HN: Which video hosting services scale well? - akurilin

Hey folks.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>At that point you pretty much want a filesystem-like UX that&#x27;s specifically built for bulk editing, moving, renaming etc. Haven&#x27;t stumbled upon anything quite like that though.<p>Cheers.
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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.

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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.. :)

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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.

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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.

