From Gab: Andrew Torba: Video is EXPENSIVE & a Complicated Technical Challenge!
[Here it is out of the mouth of Andrew Torba the owner of Gab, that video is very expensive and its a complicated technical challenge! So my achievement on my own site, putting together a video platform for me that allows me to store hundreds of large videos and serve them up is not too bad! He is right, its a hectic thing to do. Its the most complex of all the website challenges! The scale of what I’ve done isn’t comparable to Gab. But even so, its not easy. Jan]
Gab Video:
Over the past year we’ve had numerous hurdles and issues with Gab’s video service. The infrastructure behind it, provided by our host Azure, is horrible. It’s no excuse, but it certainly hasn’t helped things and they haven’t been helpful at all in working with us to improve it. Recently we’ve been looking into other providers to help us make the service better.
We were really impressed with Cloudflare’s new video offering after some initial testing and have a call with them hopefully this week to discuss pricing. You can see an example video we uploaded and compare the quality of it to our current setup: https://watch.cloudflarestream.com/6872d8398f02b23…
Video is expensive and by far the most complicated technical challenge we face. We’ve seen our hosting costs rise dramatically over the past few months because of it, which is partly why we have focused on other areas of the product.
Gab Livestreaming:
We are also looking into other third-party providers for our livestreaming service (which is separate from the video service, although they are connected in ways.) Again it comes down to cost. We may need to have different tiers of GabPro based around video/streaming because that’s where the bulk of the third-party and hosting expenses are coming from. Or we may decide that it is best to come back to livestreaming at a later date and remove it for now. As always we will keep everyone posted on that as we learn more.