Topic: Looking for Development Mentor (KLYEMAX.COM) - page 7. (Read 24078 times)

My hope and vision is eventually to set up my own streaming site. It is part of the master plan.
Hosting our own servers would be preferred as well. I think non-VIP accounts would have reduced yet viewable streams where as the bandwidth intensive HD streams would be reserved for those with VIP access. I am hoping this will make it profitable to offer such high quality streams. I need to talk to some IT techs and get some qoutes on how and were we can get the cheapest hosting while still being able to provide the quality we are aiming for. At this point I am still researching nice PTZ HD cams as well as stream splitting for multiple sites to maximize profits. All constructive advice and criticism is greatly appreciated at this time. A lot of smart people are on these forums and those with good intent will indeed aid us through thoughts and posts to help guide us into sustainable hosting and streaming.

Cheers all,

Kyle.T

If it says free traffic and you are trying to host a bandwidth intensive adult live streaming service. I can guarantee most affordable hosters will cut you off faster than you can collect the tips. These calculations are always mixed and under a fair-use-policy, so your legal ground will be thin.

Well you have to not only count in total bandwidth , you have to count in the limited connections per server.

Assuming 1 Gbit on one of those machines : https://order.us.unmetered.com/pages/dedicated/

As in you have probably something around 5 Mbit in moving Pictures , this means your 1 Gigabit unmetered Server can serve 200 Users Max. Not facturing in possibly Resource limits as in CPU/RAM-Power.

So you want to serve 1200 Users, well that would be at minimum(!!!) 6 of these babies in an optimal environment, properly load balanced. And you are paying around 600$ in the lowest tier / Month.

You are paying them with and without load and no chance to scale quickly, because you have to order another one.

How big is your Budget for IT-Personell who can pull this off properly ? Implementing existing solutions or creating a new one ? Do you buy something or does something exist that needs to be modified ? Who will do this ?

Don't get me started on CDN or DDOS. On this Budget , Self-Hosting is out of the Question , if you want it to be moderately successful (and running well ).

Lot's of luck to you bro in your venture. I hope all goes well.

Mikey

And also, you also need DDoS protection. Your site will get DDoS attacked if you run a cam site.

Here is how much it is going to cost you (quote from email I got when I ran something similar):


You probably need unlimited (because I got attacks in the 30Gbps range). You might think, oh I'll go with cloudflare, $200/month DDoS protection right?!

No, go call cloudflare with your business description: +1 (888) 99-FLARE

They will tell you that they will only be able to protect you with their enterprise package. The quote I've got was $4500 a month, on 12 month contract.

See https://www.cloudflare.com/plans, 'Averages $5,000 monthly'

Blacklotus (http://www.blacklotus.net) quoted me $10k+ a month, $5k setup.

Prolexic (now part of Akamai) refused to do business due to the nature of the business.

And before you think I'm a troll, I've done this before, it sounds lucrative but in reality it is not. There is a VERY high barrier to entry, and it is an extremely difficult business. You're dealing with Bitcoin so no chargebacks or fraud which helps, but this is not a business you can launch out of a trailer and expect to be successful.

Yeh, check my next post where I corrected the GB price. I agree with around $0.10/GB

This is not practical or all the other cam sites would cut their operational costs by 80%. WebRTC "works" (and by that, I mean it technically passes data, with up to 100% [yes, 100%, not a typo] overhead).

When certain users (who is streaming content to others) closes their tab.. your users are going to black out for a second or two. I am sure you are aware in cam sites there are people joining and disconnecting multiple times per second.

Also, most (ie, pretty much all except people in South Korea) residential internet connections cannot upload 720p in real time. Forget about 1080p.

Finally, it introduces significant latency (can be up to 10-20 seconds, especially the peer you are getting the data off is on 3G, is on Tor, etc)..


$0.03 per gigabyte? That's really scurrilous lol, Amazon cloudfront offers bulk rates of $0.03 per GB after streaming 524 TB a month. That is more than $25,000 a month in bandwidth costs you have to spend before you pay $0.03 per GB.

MRKLYE is looking at $0.08-$0.10 per GB. Please show me where you can find bandwidth cheaper at this scale? Let me know, I would love to switch from cloudfront which is one of the cheapest CDNs already.

And yes, Rupture is right. A 3 hour show to 1200 viewers at 480p will cost you $250++. Do you ever wonder WHY all the cam sites charge ~50%? Competition should bring it down. But no, because the vast majority of the 50% goes to their CDN for bandwidth. And the established cam sites are only paying a third of what you would pay.

Rupture actually underestimated, if you want good video quality worldwide then you will need to distribute the stream from multiple edge locations, the top band for CloudFront is as high as $0.25/GB.

At your scale, I would expect you to be paying around $300 in bandwidth costs for a 480p 3 hour show with 1.2k viewers. Bandwidth only becomes cheap when you are shelling out $25k, $50k, $100k per month in bandwidth.

No it is not. You NEED a content distribution network. You are pushing out gbps.

You CANNOT use any shared hosting, VPS hosting, or dedicated servers. You need a CDN.

As for the bandwidth concerns: go p2p use the webRTC data channels and your clients will be helping you with bandwidth
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/datachannels/

Also, there are other ways of reducing bandwidth costs

No problem, but the expenses are legit. I have seen dozens (hundreds) of webcam sites coded over the years. The problem is always scalability. When you put even 20 live streams on at once and thousands of viewers you run into problems that are not addressed in chap Chinese code. Anyone can code a functional webcam site, not many can code a functional webcam site that is optimized, rarely crashes and will scale past one or two streams reliably. Even the best coders are going to have unforseen bugs in their software which requires a staff on hand to deal with it. It's a really big undertaking and I am not kidding about people dropping millions on sites you've never even heard of. Chaturbate was started by industry veterans that already had millions in the bank, tons of connections with talent and webmasters and a decade of experience.

Cheers

Noted NLNico.

The plan was to host my own servers eventually and stream from them. Even then I will have to look into the business internet plans offered here and see what type of caps they impose on the plans.

I do plan to stream in 1080 for the most part. Although I am leaning towards at this point in time only having VIP members have access to such streams as to help offset bandwidth costs. Jimmy Freeloader who isn't paying for his cam watching doesn't need to have the best experience possible, as he isn't paying for it.

The site development isn't going to be super cheap by any means, nor is the hosting. But I think it's possible to get a solid working beta site up and running with what we have invested. Again, I am not trying to go massive off the start. We will get the site up and running and some servers going before we expand.

Cheers,

Kyle.T

Alright ABitInterested. I may have been over defensive in dealing with you initially.

I had you pegged as a fellow also running cams and showing talent, If you are indeed no, you are correct.. Not a competitor.
Your advice isn't as malicious as I previously perceived it to be and I apologize for any nastiness I may have directed your way.
Coding is not nearly as expensive as you think. Hell, you can hire fluent object orientated Chinese coders for less than a pack of smokes an hour. Not saying this is the plan but you get the idea.

I'm not looking to re-invent vibrating suits nor am I looking to step on any toes unnecessarily. This is a highly competitive multi billion dollar industry I am stepping into.. Even a small % of the pie (so to speak) will put both the investors and my studio in a nice profitable place.

And I think you are calculating expenses assuming no revenue which is silly. As said before sex sells itself.

I appreciate the heads up and the concern though ABitInterested. Hell, give it a little while and I actually might need your hand with promotions through your affiliate hobby. Far to many people on here quick to make enemies and offer no real advice. I applaud you for speaking what you feel is true.

Cheers,

Kyle.T

Actually my calculation seems wrong. 1080P video is around 5 - 9 Mb/s but that's megabits not megabytes. So let's say 8 Mb/s so 1 MB/s, then it would be 1 * 7200 * 1200 / 1000 * 0.03 = $259.2

$0.03 per GB is low though, that assumes that you will have petabytes of traffic each month*. $0.06-$0.12 per GB is more realistic. So price would be 2x259.2 or 4x259.2 still around $600-$1000 for 2h show I guess.

* based on CDN Fastly: http://www.fastly.com/pricing - just a random CDN though, probably not cheapest or whatever




So then you would not take a CDN but a dedicated server and have streaming software on it (which will require some expensive software and more development.) And for the bandwidth, still you could make calculations. Most dedicated servers do have a TB limit, like 100 TB. You can calculate how many 1000-viewers hours that is per month. Also I am not sure if for example a 100 Mbit or 1 Gbit connection would be enough for thousands of 1080P streams (you can calculate this too though.) And then I am not yet talking about the hardware (which probably is more difficult to calculate.)

Obviously you would start with a smaller server too. But then again you can calculate it

Like if you have 1MB/s stream, 1 hour, 1000 viewers, 1000 MB = 1GB:

1 * 3600 * 1000 / 1000 = 3600 GB per hour. So 100 TB cap: 100*1000/3600 = 28 hours of 1080P streaming with 1000 viewers (assumes they all watch for 28 hours.)



Developing a site (without the actual streaming part) is not even that special. But you definitely have to look carefully into the hosting aspect. You cannot just get any "unlimited" hosting package, they will block you in a day, all covered in their TOS.

You will need to make an estimation of shows, hours and viewers per day. Turn that into a number of gigabytes. And check how much that will cost with several CDNs and dedicated servers. And if you go with a dedicated server you gotta look into streaming software, development costs, hardware requirements and connection speed limit. Ideally you could make an estimation for when you have 50 viewers, 500 viewers, 1000 viewers, 2000 viewers, etc. And also private shows / non private / lot of tips / few tips. So you can calculate the estimated costs / profit in the beginning and as you grow. And also in the ideal situation (lots of private shows + tips) and the least ideal (no private + few tips.)


EDIT: my math is probably still wrong, but just for example so you can calculate it in detail yourself.
EDIT2: Also remember that these costs should be covered by your 15% cut only (!)

There is no free bandwidth for a Chaturbate style webcam show. It is custom everything and it is expensive.

I'm not trying to talk you out of your venture, you already collected money and have put the wheels in motion. I only suggest that you thoroughly investigate all that is involved in starting your own webcam site before you ever spend a penny in that direction. There are plenty of things you could do to make money for investors and grow the business long term that don't involve chasing something that will drain you in every possible way.

Recruiting and keeping talent is hard enough as it is as I'm sure you will figure out soon enough. At least that is an inexpensive lesson.

Anyhow, good luck with it. May you be the #1 whatever you do.

I am in no way competition to you, none. I promote programs as an affiliate.

As for how long the market has been around, clickcash had ifriends.net online and popular in the late 90's. By 2001 or so they had already paid out millions of dollars to affiliates.

There is no realistic budget in owning an actual cam site. 7 figures is in the single digit millions and Chaturbate spent well into the millions getting their site up to par. The code work alone would cost you at minimum 6 figures and I don't mean $100,001. Sourcing your own custom webcam software will cost anywhere between $50,000 to $1,000,000 or more and you will be delivered a buggy piece of shit that will need to be tweaked multiple times before it can be used on a wide scale.

As for unseen client interaction, there isn't much left. ifriends.net offered cyber dildonics (remote sex toys) and remote controled webcams that the viewer could control way back in the early 2000's.

I have seen multiple companies that had half a clue spend well over a million dollars only to fail. There are very few successful players in the space and even many of the sites you might think are successful are just skins of one of those successful ones.

The expenses in running a full fledged Chaturbate competitor far exceed any amount you could make with the first version of your plan and the amount that could be raised in your second stock offering.

Consider it a friendly heads up. There are a whole slew of problems you are going to run into even on the simple first part of what you have proposed but at least with that you have a chance. Fuck on cam, make a few bucks, pay shareholders. If you invest all of that money into the big picture pipe dreams you are going to have a lot of pissed off people looking for you.

Cheers

@Rates:  As soon as all the 'I's are dotted and teh 'T's crossed, MRKLYE's good to go

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596706.new#new Check out this thread and go see if you can trade with a shareholder.

And as for shows starting up we're hoping to have some this week but not entirely sure at this moment.

*shaking my fucking head*

OUT Lambchop OUT! *points to door*

I only care about the stock when can trade? And studio, what time do you start work?

OK tiger, don't mean to piss on your parade.
*Though I understand that could be quite entertaining --you into golden showers?

For the love of...


Lambchop you daft cunt... -_- A regular show WITHOUT any private show action can easily net as stated.

Private shows however are a huge money maker. Please raise up off of my balls and find something productive to do with your time instead of making yourself look like a mongol all over my business.