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by XCSme 2052 days ago
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?

1 comments

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.

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?

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