For years we have wanted to give publishers the same experience with self-hosted video that a platform like Vimeo or YouTube provides. You just upload your videos and then the video is available to all platforms and all screen sizes automatically. In the beginning there was nothing available like this. At some point, platforms like Wowza, Brightcove, Zencoder appeared but very quickly they switched their business model from encoding for self-hosting to forcing to publishers to host on their servers using their CDN. Usually encoding was very expensive with minimum monthly spends ranging from $500 to $2000. Most of these solutions were not easy to use and a little bit clumsy, although some offered better interfaces than others.
Later, AWS appeared theoretically to shake up the self-hosted video encoding landscape with Elastic Transcoder and Cloudfront CDN. When Elastic Transcoder first appeared with its extremely complex interface and horrid documentation, we thought this will get much better with time. As most of you know AWS is still absolutely no fun to use and requires fairly serious technical chops to get anywhere with it.
We are very excited to announce that there is an easy to use and affordable and capable secure video transcoder out there now. It’s called Coconut.co and we’ve built a rock solid integrated workflow for it with Digital Ocean Spaces for storage and BunnyCDN for distribution. What’s even better is that we’ve made our Coconut.co add-on free for FV Player Pro users.
The free version uses Digital Ocean Spaces and BunnyCDN as they are the most affordable reliable hosts and CDN’s for encrypted HLS and we’ve heavily tested that exact integration to ensure that it works flawlessly.
For those who would like to store the video on your own servers and use your own CDN we are delighted to offer custom integration with Coconut.co for $300. For now we are unable to offer the code off-the-shelf at a lower price, as each integration needs to be tested and tweaked to ensure that it works reliably and securely. With all the moving pieces, personal support is required, hence the service.
Learn more about video encoding here.
