Ask HN: Recommend video streaming CDN service

yep, some other cdn(don't remember which) added up to $100. better than 360 but still outside of a budget for daily use. as a one-off, sure, price is not that important. but if i would have just one user streaming once a day for 6h i'd go bankrupt in no time.

right now i am thinking i would simply do 1:1 streaming. so no transcoding. what you put out is what the audience gets. so if you stream with too high if a bitrate, tough luck. i could handle it with couple of cheap VPSs.

i did, 6h stream at 1Mbit with 1000 viewers would be 108$. i can have 3 powerful VPSs with 2Gbit unlimited bandwidth in OVH. so far it seems there is no service that makes financial sense :(

I looked into this a few years ago and it was pretty rough. There are free platforms like YouTube, then there are extremely expensive options. The least expensive of the expensive options I found was just digital ocean, but I found playback didn’t work under a vpn

Let us know what you find

You most likely want https://antmedia.io/ Ant Media WebRTC streaming library. It's the back-end for most adult streaming sites and alternative livestreaming sites. Cheapest option by FAR if done on budget hosts, especially if bandwidth is free or cheap (ex. Hetzner Cloud US gives 10TB free).

Some other options:

Free:

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ Free/Open Source, built for video calls but also works for livestreaming*

https://livekit.io/ Free SDK, similar complexity to Jitsi but tailored specifically for live streaming

https://www.ovenmediaengine.com/olk Roll-Your-Own auto-scaling live-streaming solution

...

API as a Service:

https://www.100ms.live/ Super low-latency livestreaming API with premium pricing

https://castr.io/ All-In-One, ok pricing

https://www.api.stream/ Good, pay as you go pricing

https://liveapi.com/pricing/ Good, pay-as-you-go pricing

https://www.simplelive.co/livestream One click embedded live stream start-up, pricing seems too good to be true

...

* Example repo which used Jitsi for livestreaming to thousands: https://gitlab.com/guardianproject-ops/jitsi-aws-deployment

...

All of the options will run ~$100 to $3000/month for streaming 100 hours a month to 1000 users, with APIs costing the most and bandwidth being the main cost of self-hosted solutions.

Using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud anywhere in your stack can easily 2-3x your costs above the high bound.

+1