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CloudFlare is entering a very crowded space. With YouTube and Facebook owning an overwhelming majority of video hosting market, what’s left is shared between Brightcove, The Platform, Ooyala, Bitmovin, Vimeo, Vidyard, Wistia and a whole ton of smaller players and in-house solutions (ffmpeg -> _any cdn_ -> video.js). Surely, this piece of the pie is not as big as many had hoped for, but there’s definitely more than a 1000 companies that think their video content is worth a better platform than YouTube or Facebook, however they define “better”. What’s the deal with ‘lossless compression’? I feel like they use the term very differently from how the industry uses it. Multiple resolutions, adaptive bitrates, dynamic packaging for different versions of HLS/DASH/Smooth are pretty much a must-have for any video solution these days, free or paid. It’s amusing to hear an argument that CDNs are hampering adoption of better video compression from a CDN company. However, while Akamai surely would love to bill for more bytes per minute of video, no one is asking them. They just distribute whatever and however many bytes origin server has for them (give or take some convenience features around it). CDNs are scrambling to provide compelling features to increase stickiness, usually with limited success when it comes to video. Bandwidth-heavy customers do want to take advantage of rapidly commoditising technology and falling prices and are pushing for multi-CDN strategy. Using correct terminology and customising stock Bitdash player would have helped at the start of such ambitious endeavour. Good luck to CloudFlare and congrats to Bitmovin. |