

Ask HN: Do you host paid video content? - grep

What technologies do you use? Which CDN (if any)?
======
Terretta
We host paid video content. We support pay-per-minute, pay-per-view, and a
variety of DRM technologies.

We offer native "paid video" streaming to Android, iDevices, and all flavors
of personal computer. We support the current HTML5 video stack, including
WebM. Our datacenters run Wowza Pro, IIS Media Services, Windows Media Server,
Darwin Streaming Server, and other less well known services. We don't make
customers share a slice of "a server", we're providing hierarchical video
caching and distribution across an International footprint for even our
$19.95/month customers.

We are a CDN -- or a VDN, actually:

<http://www.advection.net/>

[http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/servic...](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/service_provider/hosting/premier.aspx)

We like helping startups, so do Edgecast and BitGravity. If you don't need
quite as much flexibility, Limelight's got great video infrastructure, while
Akamai's the largest scale if you've got the budget.

<http://www.edgecast.com/>

<http://www.bitgravity.com/> (home page is Flash)

<http://www.limelightnetworks.com/>

[http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/streaming.htm...](http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/products/streaming.html)

------
trun
I always recommend Brightcove (<http://www.brightcove.com>). It's relatively
cheap and has an amazing feature set. Everything is customizable and
accessible via an API and even works in sans-Flash environments like the
iPhone.

~~~
grep
$499 for 250GB BW seems a bit too much.

~~~
trun
It is, but you're paying for the player / CMS / advertising tools as well.
It's a lot more than just a CDN.

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dageroth
If you are hosting paid video content then you probably don't have so many
people accessing your content simultaneously, so hosting it yourself is not
that difficult? I rented two servers at hetzner.de a few years ago.

49 Euros per month, 5 GB of streaming included, afterwards 6,90 per TB. As a
streaming server Wowza is offering great software and service, the license was
less than a 1000 $. With this setup you can get away for less than a hundred
Euros per month and stream 10 terrabytes from two machines and can add easily
more machines, when necessary, or use AWS as a fallbacksystem for
trafficspikes. Beats pure AWS-Hosting by a wide, wide margin, at least it did
for us...

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ScottWhigham
Might I ask who you are and why you are asking? I get enough phone calls from
CDN sales people that I don't want to give them more ammo or a bigger target
lol

~~~
Terretta
> _I get enough phone calls from CDN sales people_

And PS... we don't have _any_ of those.

We're all devs or sysadmins and prefer time-shiftable email, so you'll never
get a call from us unless you ask.

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ninjastar99
We use Bitgravity and could not be happier.

~~~
user555
Revision3 and Break have switched to 3Crowd. Using Bitgravity and other CDNs
all managed by 3Crowd. Must be something in that, huh?

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javery
At TekPub we use Amazon's CloudFront, it includes streaming (using Adobe's
streaming server) and also allows for authenticated content. We do about 1-3
TB a month through it with basically no issues and pay less than $500/month
even at the high end of that range.

~~~
grep
Amazon CloudFront does not provide any security against copying your rtmp/http
stream and paste it in any other website.

~~~
javery
It most definitely does. You can authenticate using a token that only allows
access via that url for a set period of time and also from a set range of IPs.

edit for link:
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/De...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/index.html?PrivateContent.html)

~~~
grep
"You set the Amazon S3 ACL on your objects so that only you and CloudFront
have read permission for the objects. This means that end user access to the
objects can only be through CloudFront."

The ACL is for the S3 and not the CloudFront.

Don't take my word for it:

[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=49757&tstart=0)

[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=40080&start=15&tstart=0)

[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=40080&start=0&tstart=0)

Edit: The signed URL protects the "copy and paste" but not the "easy" ripping.

~~~
javery
If an authorized end user (meaning they have a valid signed URL) is ripping
the content I don't see a way anyone could stop that. If nothing else I could
easily just record my screen with a screen capture program. :)

~~~
grep
Yes, but there's a difference in capturing the video one at a time or run
Orbit and rip all the movies at once.

------
vgurgov
After having the same question and failing to find a good service i developed
www.videolla.com for exactly this. It still not launched but feel free to get
on our waiting list - i will be sending free invites soon.

