We discovered the woes of video hosting and built a better system
Wistia transitioned from a portfolio website to a video hosting platform, focusing on quality and reliability. Their innovations include an in-house encoding service and the new Aurora player for improved performance.
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Wistia, originally founded to create a portfolio website for artists, evolved into a video hosting platform due to the need for a reliable video infrastructure. In 2006, the founders recognized the challenges of video sharing, particularly in maintaining quality and control over content. They built a comprehensive video hosting system that included features like a customizable video player, cloud storage, and analytics. Their platform was designed to address the shortcomings of existing solutions, such as YouTube, which lacked the necessary features for professional use. Wistia's infrastructure focuses on quality, reliability, and speed, allowing for global video delivery and scalability for large brands. The company has developed an in-house encoding service to ensure high-quality video playback and accessibility features to comply with standards. Their latest player, Aurora, enhances performance while reducing load times. Wistia continues to innovate and tackle challenges in video hosting, emphasizing that it is a core aspect of their business, not an afterthought.
- Wistia began as a portfolio site and transitioned to a video hosting platform due to market needs.
- The platform focuses on quality, reliability, and user experience, addressing gaps in existing video solutions.
- Wistia offers an in-house encoding service and accessibility features to enhance video sharing.
- The new Aurora player improves performance and reduces load times significantly.
- The company remains committed to evolving its infrastructure to meet the demands of video hosting.
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5 commentss3 -> mediaconvert -> s3 -> backblaze -> fastly
gives you a super low cost solution that can scale forever. If you commit to bandwidth for fastly you can get that super cheap.
I've played around with ffmpeg for a few days, and with over 100 videos I couldn't get it to make the video smaller than mediaconvert. That's probably a personal problem, but it makes me wonder how good the ffmpeg encoders actually are. And I was using the original source to compress.
Anyway, good luck to you. The video space is about marketing. It's really crowded, and in the end marketing people don't care how much or how good the solution is...which is why BrightCove and Vimeo exist. They literally suck at everything except marketing. It'll be a great day when they die.
There are plenty of challenges with video transcoding and delivery even today. ffmpeg/libav are still at the core of any transcoding but they are opaque and their integrals are difficult to understand let alone modify. Global CDNs are able to help but you do hit a wall pretty quickly where it goes from cheap to expensive to basically impossible. WebRTC is an emerging technology that is still full of bugs in the spec and implementation. Browsers don’t really handle video decoding in what you might call robust way.
There are plenty of problems to solve in this space. Just saying that you built infrastructure that is “ reliable, scalable, high-quality, secure, and cutting-edge” is not enough to explain how you overcome any challenges. It just sounds like a buzzword salad.
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