Finding a good video host for educational content (just starting out)

Important

  • Reliability ()
  • fast to start
  • avoid buffering
  • fast to upload / encode
  • good bitrates
  • not too agressive compression (quality doesn't suffer)
  • analytics? watch rate? Where did people drop off?

Bonus

  • paid tier / sub management

Considerations

  • big enough / proven enough / trust enough that you won't disappear tomorrow or are a scam
  • is this an add-on product that isn't getting love becaues it's one of 30 products and nor your core business? (Cloudlfare stream)
  • how clear is the messaging and marketing? Info easy to get to?
  • how responsive is support?
  • pricing & bandwidth limits?

Basics of how streaming video differs from a download

  • AWS Amplify VOD (video on demand)
  • Azure VOD
  • DO streaming
  • Cloudflare Stream - NO
  1. Audio quality was garbled (guessing too aggressive on the compression)
  2. Impossible to even find how to contact support for Stream. Every support flow sent me to "domains". https://twitter.com/jamischarles/status/1503584822626713600 Pricing page was CONFUSING

Mux (too pricey?)

Disqualified early

  • Vimeo always felt slow to me
  • AWS VOD (setup is too complex)
  • Wistia (too pricey)

How each one scored

One I went with for my purposes...