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

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 mainstream, and it'll only be more difficult for the video market.

- [1]: https://micro.blog/about/pricing

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.

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 Rumble a bit more, as well as appreciate the entry of Pepperbox, Floatplane and others. It's still a bit of a mess and none of them match the 10' experience of YouTube on Android TV, but it's getting better.

$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.

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.

Just to add, you should never serve video straight from R2 unless you pre-render all your videos for all major devices. Otherwise you get very, very subpar device buffering performance. Generally use R2 as a cache layer over your stream processor (CF Stream).

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.