Introducing Dailymotion Cloud Video Delivery Business

Dailymotion is expanding outside of the curated content business and into the cloud-based online video serving business and why not? After all, everyone else is doing it too no? Alright, not everyone.

The Dailymotion Cloud service seems to be taking a lot of the guessing out of online video serving. They are offering low prices, limited transcoding, and ease of use as features of their service.

Uploading of videos can be done in three ways, from a URL, from your Dailymotion account or from your computer (with multiple file sending available). The service has no file size or duration limits either.

You can also use their cloud to transcode your videos, but only to the following profiles:

• Low Quality – H263/MP3 (flv)
• Standard Quality – H264/AAC (mp4) 512 x 288
• High Quality – H264/AAC (mp4) 848 x 480
• High Definition – H264/ACC (mp4) 1920 x 1080

So no WebM even, just FLV and H.264. Seems like they might be missing the boat on that one. They do sound like they're offering adaptive bitrate streaming though.

In terms of storage and delivery you get to use their CDN (they call it an international IP networks) with over 100Gbps of bandwidth, redundant storage in Europe and North America.

In terms of playing the video they offer a customizable skin (color, logo, controls) and of course statistics on who's watching, how long, where, etc.

About that Price

The prices over at Dailymotion Cloud are, well, you'll see.

That might all look grand and cheap, but you've forgotten about storage which is equivalent to 1.5 Euro per hour of video content stored on their network.

It is understood that the amount billed according to the above rates shall be at least equivalent to the total cost of hosting the videos stored on Dailymotion Cloud (1.5 € HT per hour of video playback per month). Where this minimum is not reached, the said amount of 1.5 € per hour hosted videos will be due and charged.

So if you store 100 hours of video on their servers, it's 150 Euro (about $200 today) per month. However, if you have that 100 hours of video on their servers and stream to about 1600 people an hour each, you wouldn't have to pay both the streaming and the hosting, I think, because that would be $200 for the month. Right?

I'm a little out of touch in regards to prices because I do all my own video hosting from the site. Sure, it's not as cool as international CDN, adaptive bitrate streaming, etc. But we only have about 5-10,000 views a month anyway and our VPS handles that just fine for much less.

If you have 5-minute videos, you'd get about 19,200 views a month for $200.