Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting • Hacker News Board

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#11

Post by JimDabell » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

tracker1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was curious about Cloudflare's pricing as a comparison... it looks like $1 per 1000 minutes viewed, which means a 10 minute video will cost #1 to have 100 views... That just seems prohibitively expensive to me, it's pretty much 100% of the lower end of video advertising just for delivery fees. I know there are competing and cheaper services, but it still seems to be a big burden to get into. I've been trying to use R…

$1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/ If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).

Cloudflare Stream isn’t just for live-streaming, it’s for generic video hosting too. It does transcoding, adaptive bitrate, HLS, etc. It’s terrible and you shouldn’t use it, but it does a lot more than just serve static video files like R2.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#12

Post by skydhash » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

I believe the bit where HLS is needed is when you want to change the format or the resolution on the fly. But browsers and othe players are perfectly capable of buffering and seeking single video files.

For most media, 1080p is fine enough. Add 720p and you have enough for 99% of the world.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#13

Post by jshen » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of traffic it gets expensive quickly.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#14

Post by chrismorgan » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

Unfortunately, proximity can be important.

I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer).

Australia wasn’t great for playing high-bitrate videos hosted in the USA. With a high-quality 4G broadband link (rural western Victoria, clear line of sight to the tower 400m away that might host under 300 subscribers; at least 55/25Mbps via cheap phones when I measured it eight years ago), somehow you couldn’t actually download them at more than a few megabits per second at best. I think this is mostly latency effects, even though TCP is supposed to speed up.

India is terrible for playing high-bitrate videos hosted in the USA. A 100Mbps fibre connection can be completely undermined by what I imagine to be terrible peering arrangements on all broadband ISPs I’ve interacted with (Hireach, Airtel, Vybe), and files hosted in the US may trickle across at half a megabit per second or even less. Right now I can copy a file from my VPS in Australia at 1.6Mbps.

And so CDNs are, very sadly, rather valuable.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#15

Post by gannonburgett » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

rcmjr wrote: post #4

This is a great little site that might motivate me to leave substack

[dead]

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#16

Post by skydhash » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #13

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of traffic it gets expensive quickly.

LOT of traffic is a big if. A lot of videos only have 1k+ views and I will believe those are mostly drive-by viewing. Using a CDN can help you if you go viral.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#17

Post by skydhash » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #14

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

Unfortunately, proximity can be important. I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer). Austral…

That’s solved by CDN.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#18

Post by simonw » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #14

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

Unfortunately, proximity can be important. I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer). Austral…

Sure, but CDNs for static content feel to me like effectively a solved problem in 2025.

There are plenty of good providers and some of them are practically free.

I mean sure, if you want to roll your own CDN by hosting boxes in colos across multiple continents and applying geographical load balancing via DNS you're taking on a whole lot of extra complexity, but I think outsourcing that to Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.io or whomever is a reasonable strategy that still counts as "self-hosting", at least in comparison to using YouTube.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#19

Post by simonw » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #13

simonw wrote: post #5

> Because if hosting videos were easy, YouTube wouldn’t be the only game in town. Is self-hosting video still difficult, today in 2025? My intuition is that there are less formats to worry about today, and serving video from static hosting that supports HTTP range headers may be enough for most devices to work. What are the remaining hard problems? Maybe mechanisms to negotiate lower resolution for slower connections…

The other issue is that it's expensive. You can put a video on youtube for free and they carry the cost and cover it with advertising. If you self-host and your videos get a LOT of traffic it gets expensive quickly.

Cloudflare egress is (somehow) free.

Re: Micro.blog launches new 'Studio' tier with video hosting

#20

Post by hamdingers » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #17

chrismorgan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, proximity can be important. I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer). Austral…

That’s solved by CDN.

So it remains an unsolved problem for self-hosting.