Show HN: CuriosityStream – Netflix for non-fiction | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CuriosityStream – Netflix for non-fiction

curiositystream.com

129 pointsMPetitt113 comments

People recommend "documentary streaming sites" to me all the time that are illegal / grayzone. When I first saw your landing page, I kind of thought it was something like that.

I wondered "Is this really legit?" and my first instinct was to click one of the newspaper icons, like to see what NYT or WSJ wrote about you—but as someone else pointed out, they're not links.

(I've actually seen landing pages that have a whole bunch of bogus newspaper badges, like it's a part of their Bootstrap theme that they didn't bother changing...)

Maybe your conversion rates are good, in which case ignore me.

But personally, I'd be way more likely to sign up if you

1. highlighted that you're a legitimate business,

2. mentioned how your founder started Discovery Channel,

3. and generally polished your landing page.

Netflix has a barebones landing page but their brand recognition is extremely high...

We're currently working on new landing page variations. We were definitely planning on polishing it up but 1 and 2 are definitely great tips. Thanks!

If I may add, putting a title on the videos in your promo might help as well. I saw a couple interesting shots in the "trailer" but couldn't figure out which programs those may have come from. Also, if any of those titles are exclusives, it would be worth mentioning. A few titles on the first page when I hit the trial button were ones I knew I had seen elsewhere - which left me concerned I'd spend $5.99 only to find a couple things I hadn't already watched. If they're not exclusives, but there's a value I'm missing, then emphasize that as well.

Indeed. Was trying to get a sense of who was behind this, why I should trust the content, if there was a political slant, etc. The copy on the about page is 100% icky ("the world's best" "the world's highest value" reads like QVC/a cheap infomercial/vaporware/Da Trump)

Once I came across the credentials of Mr Hendricks, Mr. Burns and some on the advisory board, I was 10x more likely to sign up.

The few short previews I checked out worked for me too, but I'm missing information on the makers of the content. While I know and trust the BBC, please tell me more about the the lesser-known production companies. If I like a particular producer, I would love to select from a list of all of their contributions.

PS Those pop-out boxes in the preview should be clickable.

Looks like an interesting proposition.

Two pieces of feedback:

* Alarm bells ring when a company says where they are mentioned in the press but fail to link to any articles.

* I really struggled to find your pricing. I saw plans starting at $2.99 but the obvious next question was: "What are the plans? How much will I actually pay?" I ended up in your Help Center before I could find an answer.

Our press kit has links to the major articles (https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/curiositystream-is-the-w...).

Pricing is $2.99/month for SD quality and $5.99/month for HD.

Why the difference in price? Is the bandwidth more expensive or is it people will pay for a higher def stream?

Definitely bandwidth, HD video is much larger and more difficult to stream than SD.

How are you doing the streaming? I've done some work on my end for a media streamer a friend and I wrote for out NASs.

We can stream 1080p quite easily to our mobile devices from a home internet connection over a cell phone 4g plan.

My friend settled on VP9 but I was using plain MP4s. VP9 in my experience, if you have money, is the way to go. I'd setup an S3 bucket with all of my home videos and do an AWS lambda to transcode it when I finally find a job.

I don't know how well this falls into your use case because you, I assume, need DRM but I'm sure you can still find a way to do it with HTML5.

I'm really interested in your product and think I may buy it.

Video streamed through the internet is generally not just MP4 in a muxed container but some form of multi-bitrate adaptive stream that deals with smaller segments of content. Eg see Apple's HTTP Live Streaming or MPEG Dash.

Exactly, we did a whole post about it here https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

Yea I understand that. My comment is more about how it's possible that HD streaming would cost that much more.

I've been able to do it at a bitrate that is acceptable over a crappy network. I'd say that I'm not very smart and that a group of well-paid engineers should be able to do better than that.

If the cost is just "because people will pay that much more for it" then that is fine but as it rests right now it is because "the bandwidth would cost that much more"

A lot of the problem comes with A: High Quality B: High Scale C: Consistent quality internationally

Properly encoded HD video is still easily 4 times larger than the SD equivalent, so that leads to 4 times the bandwidth costs.

We actually wrote a blog post about it here, let us know what you think! https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

I'll be sure to check it out. Probably going to be a good read.

"more difficult to stream"

please describe?

Well when we say "more difficult to stream", we really mean more difficult to stream WELL. With a larger file you are inherently prone to longer start times, more buffering, and therefore a worse user experience. That's when you start having to add CDN's, better caching, and better encoding. The vast majority of people out there barely have the bandwidth to stream HD under perfect conditions. We always have to make sure we aren't the bottleneck.

Thanks for the reply.

Here is the case study limelight has:

http://img03.en25.com/Web/LLNW/%7B95f3b395-f77e-4642-bc09-aa...

I missed the connection to the Discovery Channel founder the first time around.

Again, thanks for answering the question and pointing to the medium post.

Thanks for providing the SD option. I don't care about HD and would gladly save the money.

I signed up for this and can say the product is good for the price. I wish they had native Chromecast support. You can cast the tab with chrome, but it lags sometimes.

I recommend Cosmic Front if you are into astronomy.

To the developers and guys running the site, I recommend a more legit rating system, where you can actually see what people are saying about the documentaries. Right now it seems everything has a 5 star rating which feels a little deceiving.

Oh and also, spanish subtitles would be nice.

Subtitles are definitely in the works, and we're eventually hoping to source as many translations as possible. We even recently added our first spanish documentary! (https://app.curiositystream.com/collection/221/) Hoping to have the previews live soon.

Hi, I like the concept and will definitely give it a try! It seems like you have a lot of good science content which is right up my alley.

My wife is a Spanish ↔ English translation consultant who has a lot of experience with subtitles. Feel free to ping me if you're interested in chatting with her--email's in my profile.

Native chromecast support is something we have in the works, we agree that mirroring doesn't truly cut it. And we're currently in the process of brainstorming how we can build out more of a community to add more of a dialog to our pieces. Thanks for the feedback!

Huge fan of documentaries here. I was thrilled to find about this site and definitely going to sign up. But as a designer/frontend developer I was disappointed by the overall looks of the site since it wasn't quite par with the competitors. I had my Photoshop open already so I tought why not give it a shot: http://cloud.vel.lu/2u1c0I0h0f0l

Very nice!

Wow, that looks fantastic. We just actually hired our first UX/UI designer and are working on redesigns of EVERYTHING.

Indeed! Kudos to you, sir. Love the aesthetic, color palette you chose, and overall IA.

You might want to consider naming your pricing plans differently.

There is a plan offering standard definition streaming called "Basic", and a plan offering high definition streaming called "Standard".

Those two words are often synonymous.

That's actually an AB test we have in the pipeline, hoping it seems more straightforward.

When I went to watch my first video, I got this:

html5: Unsupported video format. Try installing Adobe Flash.

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Flash is dead. How long until you support html5?

We're currently working on it now. We use HLS for adaptive bitrate streaming which has practically no native browser support. Just recently some libraries started popping up which are able to utilize the new media source extensions to play HLS using HTML5, and we are currently testing it and trying to get it out as soon as possible. We absolutely hate flash.

Do you have any mailing list so that we could get a notification when html5 is available? I am very interested in the service, but Flash is a big no-no for me and will forget it in a week if I do not subscribe.

You can subscribe to our blog's mailing list, we're going to start cross posting our tech posts and announcements through there as well. https://blog.curiositystream.com/

How I fell out of the funnel:

Preview > Click Video > Flash Warning > Close Browser Tab

Maybe one day I'll be back.

Sorry to hear that, like we said, we're working as quickly as possible to get an HTML5 compatible player up.

I signed up for the free month and discovered the Flash problem after. I don't use Flash but my girlfriend does. Since she's the one I'm subscribing for, it won't affect our customership.

I fell out of the funnel when the the preview wouldn't load, apparently because ScriptSafe blocked

optimizely.com, maxmind.com, stripe.com, and googleadservices.com.

If a service won't work without serving me up a basket of trackers and advertising scripts then I'm out.

edit:formatting

Pet peeve: apps/services that have a section that says "As featured in..." followed by a bunch of media outlet icons that aren't links.

Why would you NOT link to press coverage of your money-maker?

We've had a ton of feedback on that and are working on changing that as soon as possible.

I really like the idea, and the price seems very low for the offer, so I'm inclined to try it out.

But, the "browse" page does not immediately show anything I'd really like to watch now.

This might be a problem caused by not seeing enough of a blurb to go with the title images, even when hovering, i.e. this http://imgur.com/X76fN1C

We're working on ways to try to tailor and customize the browse page a bit more. If you're a member once you start watching some videos a recommended for you slide will be added to the home page based on your history. And thanks for the feedback on the popover. Just curious what information is most important to you as a user when picking a video? Just the description?

The only other thing I can think of is "name recognition".

E.g. I love Hans Rosling (or James Burke, Carl Sagan, Niall Ferguson or whoever) so if I see that something is based/stars/includes their work I'd likely be interested.

This is obviously not applicable to many things though, and can be somewhat included in a description anyway.

And thanks to you for taking time to read my comments :)

That's great to know, we love the feedback. And Don't Panic with Hans is one of my favorite personally (https://app.curiositystream.com/video/999)

Hey everyone, I'm one of the developers at CuriosityStream. I'd be happy to answer any questions you guys have about streaming technology or the industry.

How big is your team? I'm always curious to hear how many people it takes to run something like this, at different scales.

Well From our launch last year to 6 months ago it was just 2 of us. Now we've grown to 7 developers. We just started writing a series on how we did it. https://medium.com/p/4e8d9f7308cd

Why are the bitrates so painfully low? 720p has a whooping 840Kbps and the best 1080p stream is just 6000Kbps.

Your streams are way too over-compressed IMO.

We have been playing around with our encoding profiles to try to find a good balance, so some videos might have higher caps than others. Unfortunately a large amount of our users are still in areas with horrible connections, so we have focused mostly on reducing buffering and start times. But now that we've been able to tackle that and improve our CDN's our content quality and UHD video are next on our list.

That's understandable.

But you can't offer HD with a bitrate that's too low even for proper SD. There are simply too many compression artifacts.

I for one would not subscribe to an HD (streaming) plan if my connection wasn't good enough for it. Your problem here is that you're trying to have both sub. plans work for all users, which you can't do without being dishonest about it.

Maybe just offer a download option for HD with proper bitrates? Then even the lowest connections can make use of it, because the download doesn't have to be streamable.

We originally got our bitrates from Netflix, and their HD seems to cap out at 5800. Unfortunately due to licenses we can't offer downloads, but we're hoping to add a way to allow a video to fully pre-buffer in HD before watching as an alternative to adaptive bitrate switching.

Yeah, Netflix is notorious for cringeworthy bitrates, you shouldn't look up to them. :-)

In a perfect world, streaming services should thrive to provide the same quality as their retail counterparts, or even better in this age. Technology allows it.

But the sad reality is that Netflix's 1080p is just 5800, whereas a Blu-ray usually has at least 20000, going to >35000 even. Consumers are basically ripped off in this situation, because the quality is sacrificed sometimes even up to 90%, making even TV a more viable viewing choice.

I'm sorry to be so blunt but given that Netflix has over 75 million subscribers it's far more likely that you're out of touch with what the majority of consumers are happy with. In an ideal world we could all stream 4k lossless video, but the real world has bandwidth limitations and plenty of people are quite happy with the video quality Netflix offers. Frankly, outside of niche places like audio/video-phile sites or the occasional tech site remark I've literally never heard anyone remark about poor video quality on Netflix.

I'm no videophile, but Netflix et al. are absolutely horrendous compared to any legitimate DVD or Blu-ray release.

You can even do an A/B test, they'd without a doubt prefer the Blu-ray version in case of HD.

Consumers can prefer Blu-ray quality while being satisfied with much lower quality. For many, quality of content and selection would be valued over picture quality.

Another important factor is the type of content. If you're watching a romantic comedy it might not be as important to be in hi-def as if you're watching LOTR.

The product looks great, I am a huge fan of documentaries myself and have always wanted a service like this. I have always been interested in small streaming sites and how they keep the costs down, your plans are very well priced. Have you guys ever thought about using P2P sharing with WebRTC to reduce bandwidth prices?

We've looked into it, but it works a lot better with live streams then on demand since the amount of people watching the same piece at the same time are pretty low. But we did just start experimenting with a product from Hola that does some pretty cool stuff with adaptive streaming. http://holacdn.com/

Do you know of any good resources for learning about using P2P and WebRTC to cut down on livestreaming bandwidth costs? This is highly relevant to something I'm working on at the moment.

Unfortunately most tech in that space seems to be proprietary but here are some companies we have found doing cool stuff in the space.

Hola CDN Streamroot Peer5 Conviva Cedexis

I think some have some whitepapers, but I'd be surprised if they give much away.

Hadar from Peer5 here. We'd be happy to share whitepapers and case studies about our p2p cdn. Feel free to contact us :)

Hey, Nikolay from Streamroot here.

We also have whitepapers easily accessible on our website, and a free dashboard where you can test our technology in a few clicks. In terms of open-source projects, there are some projects like Bem.tv but they lack robustness when you try to scale.

Also if you haven't checked it out we wrote a whole post on how we tackled streaming from a tech perspective.

https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

What share of your content is available globally?

It varies from country to country, but we always purchased rights for as many as possible. Our library can be browsed without an account and should only show titles available in your country.

Is HD quality the only difference between the Basic and Standard subscriptions, or is there extra content as well?

Nope, same content, same device support, quality is the only difference.

OK this is late, but I've only just signed up. I use Roku, and was disappointed to have to painstakingly enter an email address and password via the remote. All reputable Roku apps, by contrast, connect to an account by generating a five or six character code and displaying it on the screen. The user then enters that code on the website, typically via a computer keyboard.

Does this offer playback speed controls? I watch a lot of non-fiction video content, but a lot of it is too information-sparse to watch at 1x.

We don't currently - but our underlying player supports it. We'll add it to our feature requests.

I'm not lying when I say that if you implement up to 2x speed I'll subscribe that day. Everything I watch on youtube is at 2x speed. People talk way too slowly.

Looks interesting, took some time to figure out the connection to Discovery but now I know. I think I´ll be holding out until 4k/UHD has been added. Space documentaries in 4k would be awesome. And a bunch of other stuff. I´ve subscribed to the newsletter to keep an eye on you guys, and the 4k feature. I find it a little iffy that if I go to Netflix I can login and watch stuff without any problems, without privacy badger going off. (It´s something like ad-block that stop external sites tracking my browsing and stops ads). If I go to your https://app.curiositystream.com/ I get a completely white page, like the page is broken, making me think the site is a hoax the first time I checked the page. Turning off my privacy settings and enable all tracking from external sites have the page looking normally and telling me, okay there is something there to subscribe to potentially. But why do you need all this to show the page correctly?

Some of the external stuff tracking on https://app.curiositystream.com/ are:

insight.adsrvr.org googleads.g.doubleclick.net connect.facebook.net (Something recognizeable yay, but no login or sign up with facebook, then why?) www.googleadservices.com fonts.googleapis.com www.googletagmanager.com (Google stuff is to be expected) js.maxmind.com cdn.optimizely.com js.stripe.com cdn.taboola.com platform.twitter.com (Again no sign up with so why twitter?)

There is a bunch of stuff that I don´t know about or trust, so why do you need it? why should I let it run? and if your app page needs it, it´s a safe bet it will be needed if I subscribe. I don´t like the thought of that. Can you elaborate on this? I tried a bunch of combinations as to how little I could let through the page for the site to work correctly, I diden´t find a combination that worked other than, enable everything to view it normally.

Thanks for the feedback! So all of those are pixels that we use for marketing to do 2 things.

1st is to track conversion coming from our ad's on those platforms.

2nd is remarket to people who visit our page. We find that many customers may visit the site once or twice before they actually convert, so we found it really effective to be able to specifically show more ad's to those people.

Just curious if you know which plugin or blocked asset might have caused that white page? We try to test with most ad blockers and privacy plugins to ensure our sites work without them. We definitely don't require them to use the site.

If you email me the logs in your browser console when the white page shows up it might help us debug it(matt.petitt@curiositystream.com). And once it's fixed if you decide to become a member I'd be happy to hook you up with a deal as a thanks for helping us out.

I'd like to see more content related to robotics.

The fact that almost everything has a 5-star rating is kind of off-putting as it makes the ratings pretty useless.

By the way, are you the developer I was talking to sometime last year about http://fpvracing.tv and possibly doing a doco about drone racing?

I agree, and since our DARPA stuff did really well the content guys have been working on getting more tech and robotics stuff.

We're currently brainstorming ways to have more effective feedback from users about the content. It's definitely in need of improvement.

And yes I am! I still try to poke the content guys every once in awhile to try to get involved somehow. All of us on the dev team and tech team have been following FPV racing religiously.

This looks cool! I'll probably subscribe in the next month or so. You should definitely highlight "from the creators of the Discovery Channel" on the landing because it takes you from "who are these people" to "ohh cool these guys are legit"

Interesting. I've been bombarded with ads on YouTube the last one or two months for this. Thought to sign up a few times, but wasn't sure if it was worth it. Those ads cannot be cheap!

Well we definitely like to think we're a good deal, any ideas of how we might have been able to communicate our value better? And we just started a series on how to roll your own streaming service(https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...) and our marketing/ad strategy might be a future post.

I've been watching a lot of science channels and documentaries on youtube. And the quality varies a lot. To be honest, I wasn't sure if the content on CuriosityStream would be good enough, since it's very hard to make good science films.

I guess you guys are doing it right, because I keep being interested and thinking about signing up. But for some reason I just haven't gotten around to it yet ;)

Well we have tons of big budget and high quality pieces from producers like BBC, NHK, and stuff that's been on PBS. Feel free to check out and preview our library https://app.curiositystream.com/

As far as I can tell, after using this: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate I haven't been getting any youtube ads.

I love documentaries. I am currently a subscriber to bunch of services like fandor.com, docclub.com ect.

But all of these are too America focused. I want to travel the world, see what lives are like for people all over the world. I can only watch so many food snob documentaries.

Current best bet is just going to youtube.com which has a wealth of documentaries.

Please someone make a non-america/europe focused indie flick site.

Well although we are currently english only, we like to think of ourselves as an international service. We have tons of content focusing on other cultures and countries. Feel free to preview some of our content and let me know if anything strikes your interest.

https://app.curiositystream.com/browse/category/society/1?ti...

I don't mean other languages. I mean for example, history of thailand, harrapan civilization ect.

All the documentaries in that link are Europe/america focused. History of western civilization is overplayed, I wan't to know more about what was happening in other parts of the world.

Thats a great suggestion, and ideas of specific pieces or ideas I could hand over to our content guys?

I don't have specific pieces but I second this suggestion. Always love to see history stuff outside of Western civilization!

Just signed up (it was the vertical farming episode + reasonable price point that sold me). The $2.99 price is perfect for a sporatic watcher like me.

One suggestion: please make your app available in the Amazon app store. Some of us don't want to use Google Play.

I think we are, let me know if this works for you.

http://www.amazon.com/CuriosityStream/dp/B017C70WHE

Looks cool, but could you guys list some of your content? Like is this just a bunch of low-value videos of tree frogs or are there some decent documentaries? Hard to tell from the landing page...

Feel free to tour and preview our library https://app.curiositystream.com/

It's great that you helped this one person find that content, but the feedback is useful for your site in general.

My experience was: 1) saw ad 2) clicked ad 3) not a clear idea about what type and calibre of documentaries you had in your library 4) didn't want to sign up to find out 5) bounced

You did a great job with 1-2 -- targeted me correctly as a potential consumer and even got me to click on an ad -- but you failed in the conversion of interest to customer.

We just opened up our library recently and are working incorporating it and the content into our funnel.

Any time frame on an Android TV app? I use a Nvidia Shield TV for all of my TV media viewing and would only pay for your service if I could stream it from there.

We actually just pushed it out there recently, we just got our shield for testing and would love your feedback https://goo.gl/093zUZ

OT, but it's distracting when mounted knights in cheesy reenactments like that in the video are led, as if any knight ever didn't know how to ride.

Any plans to add food/cooking documentaries to this?

I'm already sold on trying this out, but it seems very lacking in that department.

We actually have a wine piece we're going to be adding in the near future that we made in house that looks amazing. But if you haven't already checked it out we have a good bit on food to start.

https://app.curiositystream.com/search/Food/1?title=Society

How far off are native apps for Apple TV and Fire TV? This looks right up my street, but I hate AirPlaying.

We're putting the finishing touches on Apple TV as we speak. And our Fire TV app is live! https://help.curiositystream.com/hc/en-us/articles/214497157...

Ace, thanks!

Anytime!

Oh awesome. I am in. Just canceled my netflix.

Thats amazing to hear!

Is there any geo-blocking? Can I subscribe to this from my country (Germany)?

Was wondering the same. HelpSite says that 80% of the content is viewable worldwide. Fire TV app is also available in the German store. https://help.curiositystream.com/hc/en-us/articles/204913267...

There is some Geo-Blocking, but luckily most of our content is available internationally. When purchasing content, we try to get rights to as many countries as possible. You can preview our library at app.curiositystream.com and you can see all the content available in your country.

This looks seriously awesome. Nice job on the catalog broswer.

Thanks!

quick question: is there something that is not on youtube?

Definitely, the vast majority of our content is either exclusive, or only offered behind paywalls(most of which are more expensive than us).

You can check out our library here https://app.curiositystream.com/

I pay for Curiosity Stream (for about 3 months so far) and am an avid YouTube viewer and I personally have not seen any of the Curiosity Stream content on YouTube so far.

What about support for Roku? I love my Roku 3.

I develop our Roku channel - https://channelstore.roku.com/details/61657/curiositystream. You currently need to sign up on our website and link your device. The next release will incorporate Roku billing so that you can sign up directly on the device.

Comments are appreciated!

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