How would you host video if you were building “the next TikTok”?

Question

Say you are a startup with minimal funding, so costs count for alot.How would you host the video? There&rsquo;s no chance of doing it cost effectively with the major clouds because they charge 9 cents per gig&hellip;. you&rsquo;d be broke instantly.So what are some other cost effective ways to do the hosting?

andrewfromx · Accepted Answer

It sounds like you are asking "where can I get free video hosting?" and there are many sites. But you'd probably be breaking their terms of service if you used it at scale for your own site.
Or it sounds like you might be willing to sacrifice hosting quality and do something like peer to peer storage and serving but that would be a terrible experience for user. Videos would often just not play.
I think you need to raise money for this startup and pay a major cloud provider?

toomuchtodo · Answer

Dedicated servers for hot content with unmetered connections caching user generated content backed by Cloudflare R2 (no egress charge and CF will want $$$ for non HTML CDN serving) or Backblaze B2. Store metadata in a relational database like PostgreSQL for caching servers and clients.
A rough proxy as described is a few hundred lines of Python.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682458

chocolatera1n · Answer

https://webtorrent.io/faq and give users a simple tool to seed videos they like.

f0e4c2f7 · Answer

Not sure if this would be allowed in their terms, you want to check but you could host the videos initially in LBRY / odysee and then embed them into a client serving them up in a frame without hosting them yourself.
https://lbry.com/faq/embed
That might get you enough headroom to bootstrap revenue to hosting your own servers colo.

mejutoco · Answer

You can't have tiktok levels of video hosting for cheap. Instead, something like tiktok but different, might be able to optimize it.Maybe you can only post 1 second videos, maybe you can only post one video a day, or you only see the most important 10 videos of your friend. With some constraint, there could be alternatives.

version_five · Answer

I know this doesn't answer your question, but the big cloud providers all have startup programs that should be good for 6-figures worth of credits, so they could still be a possibility.Also, probably a dumb idea: can you use cloudflare images for gifs?

How would you host video if you were building “the next TikTok”?

Say you are a startup with minimal funding, so costs count for alot.
How would you host the video? There’s no chance of doing it cost effectively with the major clouds because they charge 9 cents per gig…. you’d be broke instantly.
So what are some other cost effective ways to do the hosting?

https://webtorrent.io/faq and give users a simple tool to seed videos they like.

I know this doesn't answer your question, but the big cloud providers all have startup programs that should be good for 6-figures worth of credits, so they could still be a possibility.
Also, probably a dumb idea: can you use cloudflare images for gifs?