I agree, we need to help the content producers as much as we can at this stage. Here are the general goals of the production team right now:
- quick, easy projects
- structure, external motivation
- accountability
- feedback/advice on videos
- input on website development
- experience / reel

Unlike IUSTV where I was mostly a paper pusher and not a content producer, I’m a more active participant with the production team now. Even though we’ve only met once, I’ve really enjoyed the external motivation the team has provided — I finally got off my butt to do a quick video about the weird changes going on with the employment status of cab drivers in the City. (There’s a lot of disagreement as to whether they are employees or independent contractors, and this decision has a lot of ramifications on salaries, taxes, benefits, work environment, etc.)

Anyway, this is a really fun project right now, despite (or perhaps because of) these challenges.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Current host: $10/month for 600GB of bandwidth = $0.0167 / GB
Amazon S3: $.17/GB

Since we’re working in terms of CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on the revenue side, I’ll calculate a serving cost per thousand impressions.

So far, the videos are between 5 and 10 MB, but we’ll use 10 MB to be conservative. To serve 1,000 * 10 MB videos = 10 GB.

Amazon S3 serving cost: $1.7 per 1,000 videos
Current host serving cost: $0.16 per 1,000 videos

Big difference.

So then the issue is service availability — in theory Amazon’s increased cost helps pay for its advertised high level of availability at all levels of usage.

Based on all of the above, your hybrid model makes a lot of sense. We should serve up as much as we can locally, and then syndicate with Amazon when we detect some sort of reduced quality of service from excessive demand.

With IUSTV, you had a bunch of reasons for people to work for free: recognition on campus, course credit, a creative outlet, a chance to get involved, etc. What ways can you motivate VidSF users to contribute? Until the ad dollars start rolling in (a motivator, but not the only one), I think pampering the content producers and creating other incentives is probably crucial. You need to make them feel special and involved. What extras can you give them without having to spend money?

Once people start seeing their own content on a rapidly growing site, their motivation will grow along with it. (I say some because everyone’s motivated by different things.) And word of mouth is going to be key, in getting both content and viewers.

Just random ideas. Here’s to your success!

I can help you calculate this. You probably don’t want Akamai. I would suggest Amazon S3 with a local caching layer. i.e. you serve the most popular videos, but rely on S3 to serve ones in the long tail. This is surprisingly easy to do with Perlbal.