It's interesting that they have "monetization" in one of the panels in their process diagram. Does that mean Cloudflare is getting into the advertising game?
I am curious if this means they will enable access controls on streams somehow.
One of the challenges with video delivery and where sites like YouTube can't work is if your business relies on providing videos to paid or logged-in members only.
Patreon creators get around this in a kludgy way by using unlisted YT videos (which can still be shared by rogue patrons) but that's not ideal.
But if you want to control access to a stream based on some custom business logic in your application, you're currently stuck serving your own video or using one of the existing combination of encoder/server/player that their post alludes to.
Its good to see video encoding/storage/delivery maturing; the more players in the space, the more options one has to choose from if a provider prefers to not host your content (whether that's because of a ToS violation, or because the company CEO just doesn't want to host your content). "Drop in" solutions give your provider a great deal of control over your fate, which is okay, until its not.
With Patreon raising a large round ($60MM) of financing [2], I'd expect them to build out their own streaming system based on S3, an encoding engine, and a CDN, versus be under the control of a turnkey provider (a la Reddit having to move off of Imgur).
(serious question) why would Patreon build out their own video hosting system? Unless I misunderstand their business model, that's not really part of their core business.
I feel like video hosting/streaming is part of their Patron's businesses, not theirs. They just manage the subscriptions.
If I was an investor in Patreon, I would not want them spending my money building out a proprietary video hosting platform.
YouTube apparently blocking links to Patreon (and others) on videos unless they're monetised.
"Here's a fun wrinkle: if your channel doesn't have at least 10,000 total views, you can't monetize at all. Small channels with dedicated Patreon supporters are F'd."
> why would Patreon build out their own video hosting system?
Because a fair number of Patreoneers (this really needs a better name) have private videos for patrons and, if hosted by Patreon, they can do a much better job of keeping them private than, say, making the Patreoneers use YouTube with a private link and hoping no-one leaks it.
I disagree. As has been mentioned, a common use case of Patreon is providing exclusive, private videos to patrons. Hosting it themselves of course allows access of the video to be aligned with payment.
It probably also wouldn't be that expensive. Their videos would mostly be behind paywalls. It's not like YouTube or Reddit Videos where they could get a million views overnight. So the delivery cost would be naturally constrained.
CloudFlare is in an incredible position for advertising since they are a proxy.
Imagine just dropping a tag like this onto your page:
<display-ad width="300" height="250">
And CloudFlare scans your page to figure out the genre of ad to display, does the live auction, and replaces it with a real ad. Now imagine that for non-display ads like injected content.
Meanwhile even Google has to crawl your Adsense pages to know what sort of content to serve. And they have to worry about things like websites serving different content to GoogleBot. Some interesting possibilities when you're proxying all of a website's traffic.
Even if Adsense let you render ads server-side by proxying user info to them, that's a lot more work for every website owner compared to what CloudFlare could enable since it already is the proxy.
Or imagine CloudFlare encoding live-auctioned ads directly into your videos on demand as part of the video stream itself.
And you did not even mention the biggest difference to the conventional model: those ads would be indistinguishable from regular content on the network level. Good luck trying to get an ad blocker to remove your personalized "message from our sponsors" from the picture of a kitten you wanted to see when it is watermarked right into the JPEG.
One of the challenges with video delivery and where sites like YouTube can't work is if your business relies on providing videos to paid or logged-in members only.
Patreon creators get around this in a kludgy way by using unlisted YT videos (which can still be shared by rogue patrons) but that's not ideal.
But if you want to control access to a stream based on some custom business logic in your application, you're currently stuck serving your own video or using one of the existing combination of encoder/server/player that their post alludes to.