[bluebeel]

Hello HN!

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Several acquaintances wanted a simple video hosting platform, and they didn’t want to go through Vimeo or YouTube. Having used Wistia before, I propose this one because it’s a great tool, but they are not attracted because they have to pay $99 as soon as they have over 3 videos and/or want to put their branding on the player. So they kindly ask me to do you know IT stuff to make this for them. I did it once, twice, three times... and I just thought why don’t I make a platform for it. And thus was born Hodho an alternative of Wistia.

Hodho is a simple Nestjs application backed by a PostgresSQL database. On the frontend, I use React. About analytics, I only collect information useful to understand how your video is viewed. I don’t know if John Doe in his house in Seattle watched the video at 1PM. If the user has put the DNT in his browser, I don’t retrieve the information from the browser, country, language.

The demo video comes from the transistor.fm website. Justin Jackson has kindly accepted to let me use the player for showcase purposes.

I would love to hear your feedback. Thanks and smile! :)

[XCSme]

I am actually looking for a long time to video-hosting alternatives to YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia.

The pricing seems a bit hard to understand what it means in the real workd.

> 600 hours watched time/month

This is only around 7200 views of a 5 minute video, which translates to around 240 daily visitors on a landing page. Are all the alternatives using the same "hours watched" pricing model?

[bluebeel]

The pricing of Wistia and many others is based on bandwidth. All plans on Wistia come with 200 GB of bandwidth then it's $0.33/GB. According to their bandwith predictor, for the example you gave 7200 views is equivalent to 202GB so you exceed their limit.

Now my point is that it's complicated to determine exactly how much a video is going to consume. Each provider has their own calculation. I'm going on a per minute view time basis instead. Indeed if you have only one video in your account, to reach 600 hours/month you need 7200 views. But you assume that the video is watched at 100% which is very optimistic. If your video is viewed 90% you have 8000 views. If it is watched 50, 14,400 views.

> 8000 views is 224 GB on the Wistia calculator and so it costs you $7.92 more.

> 14400 views is 404 GB and therefore you get $67.32.

I wanted to test a new approach to pricing. In the future there may be some adjustments to the quantity levels or the addition of higher third parties. I'll probably add a little calculator on the pricing page so you can test and compare how much hodho would cost compared to the solution you're already using.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. Hopefully I've been clear enough.

[XCSme]

I understand now, that is reasonable.

One question is how you know the time watched? Does this mean that every video sends analytics to your server to analyze time watched per video?

[bluebeel]

Yes exactly. When a video is playing, it send anonymous metrics about the time watched and other video metrics (play/pause/seeking,...)