In an earlier thread that is apparently too old for replies (24 days???) ... Messmaster said ...

One of the things I feel pretty strongly about is controlling the quality of my products. If/when the UMD starts re-rendering my clips, I will likely withdraw them from the store. I would have no way to know if the resulting video was sub par in quality, or if the file got corrupted, etc. I work pretty hard to keep quality as high as possible, and at current prices, 1 GB of storage costs about $0.10. In my experience, a quality product results in repeat sales. It doesn't serve anyone's interests to decimate the quality in the final step.

I haven't uploaded anything yet so I don't know but is there a way for the uploader/owner of the clip to download it for free to see exactly what the customer would get.

That's assuming some sort of UMD compression comes in which I doubt rates highly on MM's todo list.

If I knew that UMD had recompressed the clip and when, I could rush to download it and view it to make sure it was good, but what would I do if it were not up to my standards? Also, I'm not always waiting at my computer so I can check the contents of my on-line stores when someone decides to re-encode them. And finally, I spend hours editing, viewing, compressing, reviewing, and uploading a single clip. I'm not too excited about downloading it and watching it again so someone can save a few megabytes of storage. My time has value.

Just to play devil's advocate here...DESKTOP storage costs about 10 cents a gig or even a little less, but that has nothing to do with storing media online. Server disks cost 2 to 10 times more than consumer disks and any host that's worth a damn is running double redundancy at a minimum (RAID1 mirroring, often with hot spares, plus local file backups). The better outfits have triple redundancy (the previous plus an additional full off-site backup) as well as a desk-drawer full of additional replacement drives. The hardware is supported by 24/7 data center technicians and server admins, battery backup systems the size of a car PLUS diesel generators with thousands of gallons of fuel in reserve, and redundant air conditioning & fire suppression systems.

Online storage is worth about $5 per gigabyte per month if it's done right.

I will throw in a little devils advocate as well...

If it's not adding $5 of value minimum to the UMD per video, is it worth having up? It's a commercial venture after all... and the more storage, the cheaper it gets per GB right?



I'm down with not degrading quality... if it's a trailer for my work, I want to show the quality as much as anything. There wouldn't be much point demonstrating my videos are slightly fuzzy with tinny* sound and expect it to attract people to my site and purchase stuff.







*I mean tinnier if I am truthful...

That means my hosting service is losing money.

But lets be realistic, here. If you re-compress an already compressed video, you will lose quality, even if you end up at exactly the same size. If you drop 10% (let's say 50MB), you'll lose even more, and what have you gained? 0.05 GB? At your [inflated] cost, that's $0.25 per month.

I do my damned best to compress the videos as much as I can and preserve the level of quality I want in my products.

Messmaster can do whatever he wants. I will pull all of my videos. It is that simple.

Soundguy, I've been running your numbers through my head, and I think I'm going to go into the on-line storage business. If I put a RAID5 array on-line with an 8TB capacity, a UPS, and an automatic generator, I can charge $40,000 a month for it? In a couple of months, I'd just add another 8TB and I could be pulling in close to a million a year. I've been doing this all wrong. I've been writing computer software for 25 years; I've been racking my brain and developing carpal tunnel and I've never made even close to a million a year.

The problem is, it's going to be really hard to compete with all of the services that are providing VPS storage with unlimited bandwidth for $1/GB.

On a more serious note. I would be happy to provide on-line storage for my movies, if MM could devise a way to provide download links from a remote FTP/SFTP server. I have at least 40GB of unused storage, so there would be no cost to me.

No, like every other computer and utility service in the history of the world, they rely heavily on overselling their finite resources. Outside of video and file sharing sites, very few other businesses use anywhere near their paid hosting allotment.

They're probably also not doing the highest levels of redundancy at their "consumer hosting" tier levels. Is your online space in a RAID array? Is it running hot spares? Does it have an in-server back-up drive? An offsite backup scheme? Are the drives SATA, SAS, SCSI, or FiberChannel? (currently enterprise-grade SAS = $0.50 GB, SCSI = $1.20 GB, Fiberchannel = $6 GB)

There's economy of scale too. A managed datacenter with 1,000 servers needs a certain number of spare drives tucked away in the parts cabinet. A DC with 10,000 servers doesn't necessarily need an order of magnitude more spares. The same thing applies to techs and admins.

A consumer-grade hosting company probably has 10-15% "wiggle room" on their infrastructure capacities, whereas a premium-priced enterprise DC has more like 30-40%. That all adds up to much higher costs when the storage is done with 100% uptime as the goal.

I worked for IBM HQ in information systems for 8 years. You're not telling me anything I don't know, but we don't all need a Ferrari to drive to work. Storage capacity for movie clips does not have the same requirements as storage capacity for a distributed transaction server at a bank.

So lets talk about the cost in lost revenue when customers are disappointed in the quality of the clips they purchase. Why go to all the effort to shoot properly, edit, and carefully compress, if you're going to let the host degrade the quality?

This argument is somewhat moot, anyway. If MM needs another 5% of the clip price for hosting, that's fine with me. If he decides to degrade the quality of my clips, I'm gone. I'm not going to sit here and argue the cost of fully redundant, mirrored, fiber attached DASD. It's a simple business proposition. I need to protect the integrity of my product, and I care about customer satisfaction.

I'm not arguing the issue of file re-rendering. If you don't want your files modified, that's your prerogative. You can go over to C4S and pay 40%, or to Clips.com and pay 60%, or you can come over to The Mothership and pay 10% plus $5 per gigabyte for disk space where your files will be stored on RAID1 SATA arrays with daily local and weekly remote backup, plus hot spares in the servers and cold spares in the rack drawer.

That's assuming MM even gets around to implementing recompression. I talk about doing a lot of things that never actually get done

BTW, back to the thread origins... 900megs IS way too big for 10 minutes of web-delivered video. The vast majority of people in the US who have anything resembling a "fast" connection are on a crap cable system like Comcast or Charter that can barely keep a stable connection and rarely deliver even half of their advertised speeds. Once you start approaching a gigabyte file size, you end up with a massive increase in "My connection keeps dropping" type of customer service issues.

If you insist on providing "Blu-Ray Quality" HD videos, the wisest choice right now is to deliver them on Blu-Ray disks thru the mail. A considerable percentage of the US internet system is simply not ready for files of that size yet.

Messmaster once offered to recompress a movie of mine that was 540MB at 20 minutes long (3.5Mbps). That is a lower bit rate than a standard DVD. Because of his comment, I decided to upload the most recent clip in 360p format, which is about 1/2 the file size. My point is that I must have control of encoding quality.

If you drive away customers, it hardly matters that you offer the highest margins. I can, and do, make it up in volume if customers keep coming back.

$5/GB per month is still ridiculous when everything I produce is backed up here and I can get RAID10 storage plus 2000TB of monthly bandwidth for about $1/GB/month.

I don't have any where near the technical knowledge you guys have but I do have the following comments.

If you are a professional producer and have the appropriate backup locally then it makes sense hosting everything yourself and taking 100% of the profits.

I think MM (and Mothership) offer great services and don't take a massive margin. As part of this I would be willing to have limits put on file sizes in relation to the duration of the clip.

If you want 100% of the profits, you'd also need your own bank/CC processor, since the CC processor takes up to 15% on adult products. I'm not complaining about UMD's margins. They could take 25% (which would probably almost double MM's net) and I wouldn't complain. I'm not trying to be a cheap bastard, I just want quality control.

I don't have a problem with published limits on MBs/minute. That is a different question.

I wouldn't recompress anybody's stuff without first letting them know, and getting their OK. Even if I was to decide to make it policy that I would go ahead and do it without an explicit OK for each instance (not currently on the table), then I would at least make a prominent posting letting everyone know that before hand.

Storage is definitely one consideration. If it's a video that has a lot of motion or detail in it, or is of sufficient length to require a huge file size to maintain the quality, then so be it. But let's keep in mind that there are a good number of amateurs here who don't know squat about the quality settings when rendering their material. Some videos come through here where the camera was on a tripod, and there is very little motion from the subject, just in the center of the frame. But the producer just ticked the highest quality rendering setting, and we have this huge video that could easily be compressed a lot more, with little or virtually no quality degradation. These are the videos that I am targeting, not the ones that are very professionally produced and obviously need the filesize to store quality image information. Even then I would talk it over with the producer. Remember I am a producer as well and I'm fully aware of the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into quality control, from initial model contact to the final render and upload. It's not my goal to be greedy an re-render all your shit until it's nothing but jpeg artifact blocks!

The other consideration is making file sizes smaller for user convenience when they download. We're in a broadband world now, but some users believe it or not do have trouble downloading these 1GB files.

Finally, I do not charge for storage or bandwidth. There is no consequence or deterrent for people to upload files of any size and just leave them here...forever, whether they sell or not. I'm not aware of too many small sites like this one that do that. I can't afford to simply not think of how to reign in on things if they do start to get out of control.