OK this is late, but I've only just signed up. I use Roku, and was disappointed to have to painstakingly enter an email address and password via the remote. All reputable Roku apps, by contrast, connect to an account by generating a five or six character code and displaying it on the screen. The user then enters that code on the website, typically via a computer keyboard.

The product looks great, I am a huge fan of documentaries myself and have always wanted a service like this. I have always been interested in small streaming sites and how they keep the costs down, your plans are very well priced. Have you guys ever thought about using P2P sharing with WebRTC to reduce bandwidth prices?

We've looked into it, but it works a lot better with live streams then on demand since the amount of people watching the same piece at the same time are pretty low. But we did just start experimenting with a product from Hola that does some pretty cool stuff with adaptive streaming. http://holacdn.com/

Do you know of any good resources for learning about using P2P and WebRTC to cut down on livestreaming bandwidth costs? This is highly relevant to something I'm working on at the moment.

Unfortunately most tech in that space seems to be proprietary but here are some companies we have found doing cool stuff in the space.

Hola CDN Streamroot Peer5 Conviva Cedexis

I think some have some whitepapers, but I'd be surprised if they give much away.

Hey, Nikolay from Streamroot here.

We also have whitepapers easily accessible on our website, and a free dashboard where you can test our technology in a few clicks. In terms of open-source projects, there are some projects like Bem.tv but they lack robustness when you try to scale.

Hadar from Peer5 here. We'd be happy to share whitepapers and case studies about our p2p cdn. Feel free to contact us :)

Also if you haven't checked it out we wrote a whole post on how we tackled streaming from a tech perspective.

https://medium.com/@CuriosityStream/how-to-roll-your-own-str...

How big is your team? I'm always curious to hear how many people it takes to run something like this, at different scales.

Well From our launch last year to 6 months ago it was just 2 of us. Now we've grown to 7 developers. We just started writing a series on how we did it. https://medium.com/p/4e8d9f7308cd

Why are the bitrates so painfully low? 720p has a whooping 840Kbps and the best 1080p stream is just 6000Kbps.

Your streams are way too over-compressed IMO.

We have been playing around with our encoding profiles to try to find a good balance, so some videos might have higher caps than others. Unfortunately a large amount of our users are still in areas with horrible connections, so we have focused mostly on reducing buffering and start times. But now that we've been able to tackle that and improve our CDN's our content quality and UHD video are next on our list.

That's understandable.

But you can't offer HD with a bitrate that's too low even for proper SD. There are simply too many compression artifacts.

I for one would not subscribe to an HD (streaming) plan if my connection wasn't good enough for it. Your problem here is that you're trying to have both sub. plans work for all users, which you can't do without being dishonest about it.

Maybe just offer a download option for HD with proper bitrates? Then even the lowest connections can make use of it, because the download doesn't have to be streamable.

We originally got our bitrates from Netflix, and their HD seems to cap out at 5800. Unfortunately due to licenses we can't offer downloads, but we're hoping to add a way to allow a video to fully pre-buffer in HD before watching as an alternative to adaptive bitrate switching.

Yeah, Netflix is notorious for cringeworthy bitrates, you shouldn't look up to them. :-)

In a perfect world, streaming services should thrive to provide the same quality as their retail counterparts, or even better in this age. Technology allows it.

But the sad reality is that Netflix's 1080p is just 5800, whereas a Blu-ray usually has at least 20000, going to >35000 even. Consumers are basically ripped off in this situation, because the quality is sacrificed sometimes even up to 90%, making even TV a more viable viewing choice.

I'm sorry to be so blunt but given that Netflix has over 75 million subscribers it's far more likely that you're out of touch with what the majority of consumers are happy with. In an ideal world we could all stream 4k lossless video, but the real world has bandwidth limitations and plenty of people are quite happy with the video quality Netflix offers. Frankly, outside of niche places like audio/video-phile sites or the occasional tech site remark I've literally never heard anyone remark about poor video quality on Netflix.

I'm no videophile, but Netflix et al. are absolutely horrendous compared to any legitimate DVD or Blu-ray release.

You can even do an A/B test, they'd without a doubt prefer the Blu-ray version in case of HD.

Consumers can prefer Blu-ray quality while being satisfied with much lower quality. For many, quality of content and selection would be valued over picture quality.

Another important factor is the type of content. If you're watching a romantic comedy it might not be as important to be in hi-def as if you're watching LOTR.

What share of your content is available globally?

It varies from country to country, but we always purchased rights for as many as possible. Our library can be browsed without an account and should only show titles available in your country.

Is HD quality the only difference between the Basic and Standard subscriptions, or is there extra content as well?

Nope, same content, same device support, quality is the only difference.