Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

heydingus.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 40 posts

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

#31

Post by simonw »

tracker1 wrote: post #28
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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).

I may be misremembering, but I thought R2 terms disallowed video streaming content... I'm unable to find any references to this now, though I didn't do an exhaustive search.

Looks like they dropped that restriction in May 2023: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

> [...] Finally, we made it clear that customers can serve video and other large files using the CDN so long as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like Stream, Images, or R2.

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

#32

Post by RobotToaster »

mnemonet wrote: post #3

It's a great idea and challenging YouTube's monopoly is noble, but I don't see how the economics work out. The current pricing [1] charges $20/month for videos up to 20 minutes of video, which is reasonable but still far too expensive for most people to use. It's a great first step, but I struggle to see who this would be used by. So far Bluesky seems to be the only decentralized platform that's broken into the mains…

It's also nowhere near long enough for most podcasts I've listened to.

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

#33

Post by RobotToaster »

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…

Why would you do this instead of just using html video tags?

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

#34

Post by mnemonet »

simonw wrote: post #7
mnemonet wrote: post #3

It's a great idea and challenging YouTube's monopoly is noble, but I don't see how the economics work out. The current pricing [1] charges $20/month for videos up to 20 minutes of video, which is reasonable but still far too expensive for most people to use. It's a great first step, but I struggle to see who this would be used by. So far Bluesky seems to be the only decentralized platform that's broken into the mains…

Making a 20 minute long video is a sizable time investment. I imagine many people who are willing to invest that much effort into creating content would be happy to pay $20/month for hosting.

That's a fair point, especially considering everything else you get with the plan.

However, the pricing is still a far cry from non-decentralized solutions (for example, MUX's free plan offers 100K minutes per month [1]) and so the only other selling point is joining the fediverse—which is a good thing, but hard to get people to convert on (in Bluesky's case the turmoil that is now X was required).

- [1]: https://mux.com/pricing/video

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

#35

Post by simonw »

RobotToaster wrote: post #33
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…

Why would you do this instead of just using html video tags?

The video tag needs something to link to, so you still have to solve the hosting problem somehow.

The weird m3u8 trick gets you better streaming and seeking performance, plus different video quality depending on the device and network connection.

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

#36

Post by jshen »

chrismorgan wrote: post #26
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel people are often unreasonably scared by this sort of thing, so here are some numbers to give perspective and aid in decision-making. Bunny CDN charge $5/TB for their volume network, which should be pretty good for video distribution, reducing after 500TB/month. At a bitrate of 5Mbps (respectable for 1080p, significant overkill for more static types of content, as technical stuff will tend to be), 1TB is 444 ho…

You're showing it's expensive to get a lot of views on a video, or as you say, it's not expensive if you get a small amount of views.

I want the fediverse and open web to be viable, and we need a solution to hosting high view count videos.

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

#37

Post by jshen »

skydhash wrote: post #16
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we want the fediverse to take off we need a solution to the "LOT of traffic" issue.

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

#38

Post by chrismorgan »

whynotmakealt wrote: post #21
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…

Hmm, I am Indian and I'd love to experiment with the setup, I have a 40 mbps fibre and I think my upload speed is very limited and I'd love if there are ways to replicate your setup? (maybe any websites which can do what you basically did and give me some stats which I can later share here?)

The situation between download and upload speeds isn’t likely to be much different, these days.

Speed tests (e.g. https://www.speedtest.net/) may let you choose a location to measure to. If I measure with https://www.speedtest.net/ to Planet Networks, Inc. in Newark, NJ, USA, it slowly climbs to 87Mbps/56Mbps. Trouble is, at greater distances these numbers are basically always unrealistic—you can’t actually reach them in normal usage.

Various hosts give you big files you can download to test them, which is often a more realistic measurement of what you’ll experience on the web at large. https://nj-us-ping.vultr.com/vultr.com.100MB.bin, for example, is from roughly the same geographical place, and downloading it in Firefox or curl only really reaches 1–1.3Mbps and would take 11–12 minutes. Whereas https://bom-in-ping.vultr.com/vultr.com.100MB.bin (Mumbai; I’m in Hyderabad) happily saturates my 100Mbps link and completes in nine seconds.

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

#40

Post by djhn »

chrismorgan wrote: post #26
jshen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel people are often unreasonably scared by this sort of thing, so here are some numbers to give perspective and aid in decision-making. Bunny CDN charge $5/TB for their volume network, which should be pretty good for video distribution, reducing after 500TB/month. At a bitrate of 5Mbps (respectable for 1080p, significant overkill for more static types of content, as technical stuff will tend to be), 1TB is 444 ho…

Another way to estimate upper/lower bounds for hosting videos is by considering the grey market adult video industry. It seems like there are hundreds, if not thousands of websites providing access to video, and from a unit economics perspective I remember reading those advertising CPMs are on the order of $0.01-$0.05 even for the biggest and least illegal websites like the Mindgeek properties. So I would assume the more shadowy websites operate at a budget of less than $0.01 per thousand views in revenue.

I’m assuming their CDNs are just specialised low cost hosting providers as opposed to p2p IoT botnets, but you never know.

I wish someone had the time and motivation to do an investigatory technical deep dive into the infrastructure they use.

Post reply on HN