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

(heydingus.net)
89 points justin-reeves | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 13:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.284s | source
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simonw ◴[12 Nov 25 16:21 UTC] No.45902045[source]▶
> 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?

UPDATE: Looks like this offers some answers to my questions: https://help.micro.blog/t/micro-blog-studio/4081

The hardest bit appears to be HLS - HTTP Live Streaming - the thing where a video gets divided up into lots of little .ts segment files and served via a m3u8 playlist.

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jshen ◴[12 Nov 25 17:03 UTC] No.45902611[source]▶
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.
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1. chrismorgan ◴[12 Nov 25 18:12 UTC] No.45903589[source]▶
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 hours. If, like OP, you publish 90-second videos, that’s 17,777 complete watches per terabyte. Depending on your situation, that might sound like not much or like a lot.

Put the other way round, at 5Mbps and $5/TB, each watch-hour costs $0.01125, a bit over one cent, and it takes 3,555 people watching your 90 second video to cost one cent.

For the sort of scale that most people are dealing with, it’s simply not an issue.

I don’t know if bots upset this balance. They may.

If you actually are spending more than a terabyte per month on it, then for technical audiences at least, I suspect that if you invited donations to specifically cover hosting costs (something along the lines of “I host these videos myself because ads and relying on YouTube are both bad for society; if you feel inclined, you can donate to help cover the cost, currently about $X/month”) you’d very quickly get a surplus. Or for longer-form content, charge something for 4K video (which costs 4.5¢ per watch-hour at 20Mbps and $5/TB) and let that subsidise the free 1080p (costing 1.125¢ per watch-hour) stream.

(On the $5/TB figure: my $5/month Vultr VPS includes 1TB per month, and charges $10/TB after that. Some VPS providers include a lot more; a Hetzner €3.49/month VPS in Europe includes 20TB then charges €1/TB. But remember, if you host video from one point only, that it is unlikely to work well for people halfway round the planet. See another of my comments in this thread for description.)

As for storage: each 90-second 5Mbps video is 56.25MB, and at a rate of $0.01/GB/month, each one will cost you $0.00675 per year to keep. Were you to post one 90-second video every single day and keep them all online, your monthly bill would grow by about $0.20 each year.