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

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.

I grew up in Australia, and more recently moved to India. Both are well away from the USA, where we who visit find the internet to be bafflingly fast just because of low latency (since most developers aren’t at all careful about avoiding request waterfalls, so even ignoring restricted bandwidth, 200ms of added latency makes the page load take several seconds longer).

Australia wasn’t great for playing high-bitrate videos hosted in the USA. With a high-quality 4G broadband link (rural western Victoria, clear line of sight to the tower 400m away that might host under 300 subscribers; at least 55/25Mbps via cheap phones when I measured it eight years ago), somehow you couldn’t actually download them at more than a few megabits per second at best. I think this is mostly latency effects, even though TCP is supposed to speed up.

India is terrible for playing high-bitrate videos hosted in the USA. A 100Mbps fibre connection can be completely undermined by what I imagine to be terrible peering arrangements on all broadband ISPs I’ve interacted with (Hireach, Airtel, Vybe), and files hosted in the US may trickle across at half a megabit per second or even less. Right now I can copy a file from my VPS in Australia at 1.6Mbps.

And so CDNs are, very sadly, rather valuable.

There are plenty of good providers and some of them are practically free.

I mean sure, if you want to roll your own CDN by hosting boxes in colos across multiple continents and applying geographical load balancing via DNS you're taking on a whole lot of extra complexity, but I think outsourcing that to Cloudflare or Fastly or Fly.io or whomever is a reasonable strategy that still counts as "self-hosting", at least in comparison to using YouTube.