Hello. I am new to the forum and to Roku development. I had a question about hosting video files for the Roku channel. What services can I use? Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.
It’s common to use CDNs to host the video content. Popular choices include:
Limelight Networks
Akamai
Level 3
There are others…
–Kevin
thanks i appreciate the answer.
I will also add a vote of confidence in HDDN. They are part of the NetDNA architecture but have a pay as you use it approach. We use them heavily and have had no problems (not an employee or anything, just an advocate after trying the others). Also, you can consider things like Amazon S3 or EC2 as well. It all depends on the file types and of course, the cost you are willing to absorb to achieve the results you need.
Here are some others we considered:
Akamai
CacheFly
Limelight
EdgeCast
Rackspace (Cloud)
SparkCDN
SimpleCDN (now migrating into MaxCDN)
I can tell you that the big guys (Hulu and Netflix) both run on the Akamai infrastructure.
Hope that helps!
Another option is a Online Video Platform for hosting and management of your content. Here’s a list of ones that we’ve spoken to or are working with:
Brightcove
Ooyala
Kaltura
Endavo media
The Platform
Unicorn Media
Castfire
Patrick
I’d steer away from SimpleCDN. The cost may be tempting, but let me put it this way, we’d sue them if we could find an actual physical address to serve the summons.
How about S3/Cloudfront? I like it because we were able to develop a completely custom solution around it that really fit our client’s needs. The cost is fairly reasonable, too.
We haven’t tried to hook it up to Roku, yet, but are investigating that possibility. Any problems with it?
i will let you know. we are working on a solution that will use either amazon or rackspace cloud.
We currently use Amazon Cloudfront exclusively. If you want a simple to use pay as you go solution, they work great. The only downside for us has been the lack of statistics. Amazon only provides virtually unreadable log files. The streaming of videos has been very reliable.
I understand that you can use Vimeo (and possibly YouTube) for hosting videos on Roku, but I don’t know the endpoints that you would use for either of these hosts.
Does anyone else here use Vimeo to host a video for a Roku Channel and if so, what endpoints are you using?
Regarding hosting video content on Amazon Cloudfront, it appears in the Cloudfront documentation that for streaming video they support only RTMP:
CloudFront uses Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 to stream on-demand content with Adobe’s Real-Time
Messaging Protocol (RTMP). CloudFront accepts RTMP requests over port 1935 and port 80.
CloudFront supports the following variants of the RTMP protocol:
• RTMP—Adobe’s Real-Time Message Protocol
• RTMPT—Adobe streaming tunneled over HTTP
• RTMPE—Adobe encrypted
• RTMPTE—Adobe encrypted tunneled over HTTP
I don’t see how that does me any good since Roku documentation states:
The only way to deliver live content on the Roku is to use HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Video on Demand (VOD) can be delivered via HLS, mp4, and wmv container files.
What am I missing here?
In the past for testing we have used http://www.hddn.com.
I currently use Amazon s3, most of my video files right now are around 150 MB, which seems to cause some slow loading issues. Has anyone gotten around this problem or could you recommend a similar amazon or other low cost service provider. I have found that the amazon s3 is very inexpensive.
Thanks!
Bryan
Just a follow up, I have sent over 303gig of data and it only cost around $36.00
Using Amazon s3
How much bandwidth are you using?
You don’t have to pay the cdn premium, just a well connected ISP is very good on the roku at a much lower cost.
Under 2 cents a gigabyte if you make the right deal.
Whatever you do, don’t use a Dropbox FREE account to host files.They will suspend activity if you reach 10GB of bandwidth in a day (the cap for paid accounts is 250GB/day.) Maybe this is already well known, but I feel like an idiot!
We were using this method for testing, then as soon as the channel went public it crashed the Dropbox. We had to then scramble to get everything up and running and move to another server, now we have to wait for the update on the Public Channel to roll-out.
Oi Vey!
“koshermetal” wrote:
Whatever you do, don’t use a Dropbox FREE account to host files.They will suspend activity if you reach 10GB of bandwidth in a day (the cap for paid accounts is 250GB/day.)
Thanks for that update. I saw you were using Dropbox while your channel was private, and started looking at Dropbox’s TOS myself. My one client (friend) wanted to stream his YouTube band channel via the Roku. In fact, I referred him to you after I would not be able to deliver. YouTube’s TOS nixed that idea. We even looked at Amazon S3 and even that would put him over budget.
As mentioned in the other posts, Amazon S3 is what I have been recommending to a few small clients if they can afford it.
Please continue to post your findings on low cost providers. I have a few “starving artists” waiting.
