Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Running Floatplane is Expensive”.
I’M currently a networking class – and I know that you guys have touched on this before, but I was wondering what are some of the larger costs of video streaming and why are those costs so high bandwidth bandwidth is rough yeah, but why that that’s what they want To know uh who do you pay for bandwidth because they charge a lot uh? I don’t know I you have to pay for Transit across networks that other entities own is a big part of it yeah and then like having good routes. So routes is like uh. You, you might have a a server who’s like negotiated route to your house is fantastic. So if you watch a video, it’s great but the person down the street, you think it wouldn’t be that different, but they might be on a different ISP and the ghost negotiated routes in your country might be poor for that. So, like companies like YouTube, have fantastic distribution everywhere with really really great routes to basically everyone, but that’s not that simple right so like we do a bunch of our video distribution through cloudflare.
One of the reasons why we do that is because cloudflare has very very good Global coverage all over the place. We have uh. This float VPN thing we’ve talked about before, because we always like having fallbacks. That’S part of flowplane’s whole thing, so we can fall back to our own setup whenever we want, but to be able to get the amount of coverage to the amount of routes that we would have with cloudflare.
The scale that we would have to go to would be kind of crazy. It wouldn’t make sense by the way. Is this broken Kyle R’s thing here is stuck here, he’s holding it there because that’s the question we’re currently discussing, and it also pauses the queue so that uh other merch messages aren’t getting lost. That’S why you have the giant Circle. I think that was entirely Conrad’s idea. It’S it’s really implementation. It’S pretty sweet, okay, um, but yeah. So, like there’s all these routes problems, but you would think you would think – and this is where it gets expensive and also complicated or with cloudflare they’re, one of the biggest internet companies they’re yeah.
Ever we should have perfect coverage like everywhere, right, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, hey yeah, why why don’t we nope, oh because even cloudflare, doesn’t have like perfect coverage to everywhere? There’S certain places in Australia. Surprise, surprise that have issues we’ve we’ve notoriously had some issues in Germany. Certain routing problems in Germany – we just have lots of problems with it, even when we’re trying to feed through one of the biggest multi-billion dollar like data distribution companies in the world, we still have problems there um and we can. We can work on it ourselves. We can we can set up new Partnerships, we can try to expand our partnership map.
Do a multi-cdm thing so that if if quality to somewhere is low, we switch over to some other CDN all this type of stuff. That asks I assumed you’d use Akamai for streaming and I believe we can. We can yeah, but we have there’s a lot of cost agreements and other stuff.
We have float plane CDN, but then we also have fallbacks to cheap, cdns and and also expensive cdns, and we can actually dynamically choose which one to use to deliver the content depending on what’s most favorable for the particular user. We don’t always get it 100 right, but the team tries really hard. Akamai is extremely expensive. It’S really really good, very high quality but very expensive yeah. So we want to avoid that whenever we can, but we’ll do it if we have to yep .