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Comment by tcd | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for adding nothing to the discussion - the team page tells me nothing about the challenges they're going to face, and how they're going to overcome them. Even Google, struggles, since they've been running Youtube at a loss since 2005. Streaming video is ridiculously expensive, and they are relying on CDNs, who can give them the boot at _any_ time, and I doubt they have fallbacks beyond those that have partnered with them. It'd be no different to akamai hosting the video (which I believe Apple uses IIRC, or some other big names).

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I'm curious about your comments on CDNs. Have you had a CDN boot you first-hand (or seen it happen second-hand)? If so, what were the circumstances? Video delivery is a huge part of every CDN's business, and almost everyone doing video streaming relies on third-party CDNs. (Except for the biggest operations like Twitch and Google that have their own peering relationships and caching infrastructure.)

The only one was Cloudflare on another project (file hosting) - and being fair, we did do 20tb of transfer in a single month on the free tier, which they weren't so pleased about :P. that really crippled the website and we struggled to run the service after that point (oddly enough, going from their CDN and network to our own which could barely squeeze past 1gbps wasn't ideal).

It's more the longer term potential - businesses change, or see valuable partners and may decide to react accordingly, I guess having many CDNs is the best approach and swapping them out on the fly.

I do have other concerns, mainly about the pricing and how you plan to deal with things like hotlinking, taking a .m3u8 is super easy to abuse. You charge $780 for 416 days worth of streaming or in easier terms $1/12 hours of streaming so I wonder whether you will let people impose limits or what happens once those limits are reached.

I could easily take someone elses m3u8 and let them run up the charges on your service whilst I get the wonderful video hosting for myself.

I especially liked this part:

"Please do not upload video, download the playable assets, and then delete video."

You might as well offer that as a service since there's not really much you can do to prevent people using you as a transcode service directly (well, you can, but do you want to?)

Good questions. To address hotlinking we'll be encouraging people to use signed URLs. They're a little more complicated to work with but can protect from situations like you're describing. We also have a mechanism called Playback IDs, which allows you to kill a URL to a video (and create a new one) without deleting the video itself. Account limits are less ideal, but may need to be a reality. Mux is a utility service similar to AWS and Google Cloud, where you'll also have this issue, and we'll work with users to find the best approach.

Re: transcoding, this is something we've wrestled with a bit. If you only use us for transcoding then you lose half the value of the system we've built: the dynamic renditions based on real usage, real time CDN optimization, automatic new codec and device support at no extra cost. So we've tried to create the simplest pricing for people who want all of that, not just transcoding. At the same time, we do want to support real video publishing use cases that start to look more like just transcoding (videos with a short life span and few views). Hopefully we can find more real cases like that to help us think through that more.

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