[pjanoman]

How do you fund this? I got semi-far with some friends on building a project similar to this, however, we stopped halfway through because we realized that video hosting quickly becomes quite expensive; without a monetization plan, there'd be no way we could stay afloat. Looks great!

[andrewicarlson]

@mmcclure is right. This uses WebRTC and is currently in peer mode. As soon as I start allowing more than 4 people per room that might cause some performance issues, I’ll need to monitor that. As it stands now there is a hard cost, but it isn’t prohibitive yet.

[mmcclure]

Not OP, but video nerd. I haven't actually used the product yet, but my guess is they're using WebRTC, which can be run (almost) completely as a peer-to-peer mesh network for small enough groups.

Where video can start getting really expensive is, as you said, when you're centrally hosting/processing/streaming large amounts of it. For this use-case there's a good chance they don't end up touching the video streams themselves at all, which is really cool.

[reitzensteinm]

I'm bootstrapping a similar project, video chat but with various games.

At cloud pricing you'll be paying $100/TB, but there are plenty of alternative providers that can give you great deals. Hetzner for instance charges $1/TB for their VPS solution.

You can also cut back on video detail depending on the project - you don't need to send 720p streams for something a bit more experimental or with other things happening.

Combined that's low enough that ads should easily cover the bandwidth.