As a longtime user of Vimeo (since 2009), I was afraid this was going to happen. I built our own HLS video streaming in-house a couple of years ago and never looked back. Way faster, lightweight player, uses modern apis and codecs.
Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)
Nice work. Aren’t there decent open source alternatives though? What do you think your differentiation will be vs. a customer using an open source solution and hosting the video chunks on a CDN - or even S3?
There aren't any end-to-end open source video host solutions out there from what I can tell. DIY ffmpeg + a CDN is a great way to go. But quickly erodes when you want all the other niceties that are table-stakes today (like storyboards, subtitles, chapters, etc.).
I'll have all the niceties, but I plan to differentiate mainly on performance and quality.
- Higher quality compression (via AV1 encoding)
- Fast load times worldwide (Framerate's custom player is 18kb gzipped versus 200kb+ for vidstack/mux)
- Better publishing experience (bulk editing options, team collaboration, etc.)
Sounds good. I’d suggest niching down and talking to some customers to see who genuinely cares about those things - as they might turn out (tragically I know) to be things only techies care about.
Fair warning.. when we hear talk to customers we are tempted to reply “I talked to customer in my mind and they love my thing!”
But unfortunately customers in our minds don’t have money :)
There’re either customers out there, or if not there's learning about why youtube has almost 100% market share..
Hi HN, I've been lurking for over a year, and finally registered for an account for this shameless plug/request for feedback. I'm excited to be a part of this great community.
I run a small animated video studio and was tired of my project collaboration living across several Google Docs, PDFs and 50+ scattered emails... so I built Clientroute.
It's a client management app aimed at creative freelancers and agencies and allows their clients to follow easy step-by-step directives as a project progresses.
The back-end is completely powered by a Trello account and the app grabs everything it needs from explicitly marked cards. As a client marks to-do items, leaves comments and uploads files, they'll all appear right in your Trello boards.
Are there any freelancer/contractors/consultants out there that could provide any input?
Now I'm working on productizing that at https://framerate.com/ (beta launches next week!)