Looking for advice on hosting for video streaming (HLS) – what’s the best approach?

[Longvu]

Hi everyone,
I’m currently exploring options to set up a site that streams video content (not live streaming – more like short clips or movies on demand). My goals are:

• Viewers should be able to watch videos smoothly in-browser, on both desktop and mobile.
• I want to serve the videos in small chunks (I heard HLS is the standard for this?).
• Traffic will start small but I’d like something that can scale up if needed.

I’m still new to hosting for streaming, and I’m unsure about a few things:

• Should I go with a VPS and try to set up HLS myself, or look for a hosting service that supports it out of the box?
• Are there any offshore hosts that are friendly with this kind of content (possibly not 100% clean)?
• I’m mostly worried about DMCA and bandwidth limits – does anyone have experience or suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

 

[bountymounty]

Adult movies or just mainstream videos ?

 

[Protect Your Wealth]

It would be better top find some service that hosts it out of the box.

Anyway, you can look for solutions in the Republic of Moldova as they usually don't recognize DMCA complaints and a court order from a Moldavian tribunal is required to take down a site.

 

[Longvu]

Adult movies or just mainstream videos ?

Hi bro, My content is mainstream

 

[Longvu]

It would be better top find some service that hosts it out of the box.

Anyway, you can look for solutions in the Republic of Moldova as they usually don't recognize DMCA complaints and a court order from a Moldavian tribunal is required to take down a site.

Thanks for your feedback.

I have found a few 3rd party streaming services now.
servers like
Filemoon
doodstream
streamtape
and Upnhsare.

I am wondering which platform can guarantee me

 

[cionide]

You will likely want to self-host. Good offshore hosting is https://vsys.host/ in their UA data center. Someone recommended hosting in Moldova - in my one experience with a Moldovian datacenter it was absolutely fucking terrible, constant downtime and slow as hell.

If you want to have adaptive streaming, then you want to use HLS but be aware that this effectively leaves you with multiple copies of each video in various bitrates and resolutions - so if you have a 2gbyte video and run it in 3 resolutions for the adaptive streaming you it's probably going to take up 2gbyte + 1,2gbyte + 500mbytes depending on what you go with. If you just want the one version to save space then just encode with x264/aac in a .mp4 container and do psuedo-streaming. HLS also kind of makes it difficult to do any sort of url tokenization because you have both the playlist and .ts segments - so you'd either have to dynamically build the playlist files so that the segments have the tokenization, or you'd have to tokenize ONLY the playlist file and not the ts segments at all which would make hotlinking your content much easier for someone. This issue will not exist with mp4 psuedo-streaming because you have only the one file.

I'm not going to ask and I don't want to know what you are hosting and how much of it, but you will probably need a dedicated server rather then a VPS. VPS typically don't have much space and have restrictive bandwidth limitations.

 

[wellington]

We utilize https://pinata.cloud/

 

[cionide]

It's worth noting that any ready-made service you use will cost exponentially more then a dedicated server and running it yourself. Even taking the above-mentioned pinata.cloud as an example, their biggest $100/mo plan is 2,5tb of bandwidth which goes very fast with video.