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Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

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Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#41

Post by rafeed »

Paul12345534 wrote: post #6
WalterSear wrote: post #5

Having been sorely disappointed by crashplan's rate-limited servers and dodgy software, I'm wary of anything 'unlimited'.

I've had the opposite experience with Crashplan. Their software does take a lot of RAM though. I'm happily storing 3TB on their servers for $5 a month (yearly). I don't think that's such a bad deal.

IMO, Crashplan's service is terrible. On a university network I was never able to max out my upload. With BackBlaze I was able to max it out. Crashplan's built on Java, which is the reason for the RAM usage, while BackBlaze is native to OS X and Windows.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#42

Post by smtddr »

tluthra wrote: post #23
slg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding. I am just spitting out questions and hypotheticals that jump to mind when a see a service like this offered. How do you guys limit by file type? I imagine that is is something more advanced than simply looking at the the file extension. But if there is any advanced analysis, how does encryption come into play? Lifehacker suggests users should encrypt their sensitive data before uploading, but w…

You're right -- we have an advanced way to actually inspect the file to ensure that it's a valid file. The encryption happens post-check. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data and then upload it up yet (but have a few ideas on how to make this work for the future). Besides, if you did encrypt all your stuff, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of all our media features like video/audio st…

Huh, so I could build a competitor to twitch.tv and host all the media for the website on your servers. Keep the small static html, css, js, swf, etc. files on some other cloud provider.

You'd charge me only $20/month for media storage+streaming and I'll probably only be charged perhaps $30/month from a cloud provider. $20/month for the server just being on and maybe another $10 for the bandwidth of the static files(which would be mostly cached client side after the first couple of heavy usage months).

Maybe another $10 or $20 for the CPU time to make a couple of url-routing decisions server-side; have to maintain my own database of users too.

Probably still much cheaper than whatever twitch.tv currently has to pay.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#44

Post by icelancer »

ghshephard wrote: post #29

The instant I see the word "Unlimited" - I don't even bother to investigate further, as the project is either (A) Lying, (B) Unsustainable, (C) Rate limiting or otherwise bottlenecking you so you can't really use the service effectively. I've seen dozens (maybe more) references to the "Unlimited" service, and with only a few exceptions, they always fall into one of those categories. I'm wondering when other people co…

>The instant I see the word "Unlimited" - I don't even bother to investigate further, as the project is either (A) Lying, (B) Unsustainable, (C) Rate limiting or otherwise bottlenecking you so you can't really use the service effectively.

I agree. It's infuriating, really, especially because the defense is always: "Well everyone else is a liar and that word doesn't mean what it means in the dictionary!"

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#45

Post by ritikm »

rafeed wrote: post #43

This almost seems too good to be true. Can you stream .MKV files too? Looks like there's no iOS or native apps yet. I guess we just use our browser and stream directly?

Yes, we transcode all video files so that they're streamable on whatever platform you're on (including directly streaming from the browser). We'll be giving users access to our iOS app slowly, which will let you stream MKV (and other formats) directly. You can also use our desktop app to stream directly into your native video player.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#46

Post by fletchowns »

Meekro wrote: post #37
fletchowns wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the de-duplication aspect of it have any impact on DMCA/copyright issues? For example, lets say somebody from HBO downloads Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay and then uploads it to Streem. We could assume that many other people on Streem also have that same copy of the episode uploaded. HBO then issues a DMCA takedown (could they?), would Streem delete the file for everybody? And does Streem then have to preve…

Since there's no way to globally "publish" a file, I don't see how DMCA takedowns could work.

Hence why in my hypothetical it would take the copyright holder themselves to both upload the file as well as issue the DMCA takedown.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#47

Post by dudus »

smtddr wrote: post #42
tluthra wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right -- we have an advanced way to actually inspect the file to ensure that it's a valid file. The encryption happens post-check. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data and then upload it up yet (but have a few ideas on how to make this work for the future). Besides, if you did encrypt all your stuff, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of all our media features like video/audio st…

Huh, so I could build a competitor to twitch.tv and host all the media for the website on your servers. Keep the small static html, css, js, swf, etc. files on some other cloud provider. You'd charge me only $20/month for media storage+streaming and I'll probably only be charged perhaps $30/month from a cloud provider. $20/month for the server just being on and maybe another $10 for the bandwidth of the static files(…

i think this service is targeted at personal clouds. Hosting some service for thousands of users on it is probably against their terms and you'll be kicked out.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#49

Post by ritikm »

fletchowns wrote: post #30
ritikm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to clarify. We use convergent encryption ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_encryption ), which works with our de-duplication. Example: You and I both have a file A. Our software encrypts that file A with a unique key generated from the file (say, the MD5 hash of the file), which makes E(A). Every user that uploads file A will generate the same encrypted version E(A) because the encryption key will be th…

Does the de-duplication aspect of it have any impact on DMCA/copyright issues? For example, lets say somebody from HBO downloads Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay and then uploads it to Streem. We could assume that many other people on Streem also have that same copy of the episode uploaded. HBO then issues a DMCA takedown (could they?), would Streem delete the file for everybody? And does Streem then have to preve…

We follow the same DMCA policy as Dropbox, etc. [1] If we get a DMCA takedown notice, we disable public linking and sharing on the file. The original owner gets to keep the file in their own account (exactly how Dropbox works).

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/how-dropbox-knows-when-your...

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#50

Post by fatrachet »

dublinben wrote: post #35

This looks like a much worse deal than OVH's new service Hubic. At 10 Euro a month ($13.80), they offer 10 TB (an essentially unlimited amount of space) with no restrictions on file size or file type. You can actually encrypt your files before uploading (which you should be doing) and host whatever you want.

Interesting, I didn't know OVH had that service, looks very nice. Although it looks like it's limited to 5GB max file size and 10 Mbit/s bandwidth, which seems very low for anybody with a decent internet connection.
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