Web Design Estimate

sketchpad

Hi, I know this is kind of 'how long is a piece of string' question but here goes;
How much does it cost to develop a website where people can create a user account and profile to post vidoes. Kind of like youtube but on a smaller scale.
Videos would be searchable by category etc.
I'm just looking for a rough ballpark idea of price, thanks for your help.

KonFusion

Have you tried ringing any companies asking for a quote?

sketchpad

No, I just need a ballpark figure to see if the project idea is worth proceeding with. Don't want to waist a companies time for something that might never happen.

28064212

It can be done for €200. You can also buy a car for €200. It will look awful, be a nightmare to maintain, and may not do much of what you expected, but it can be done

tricky D

Without audience figures it is a length of a piece of string. These kinds of sites scoff loads of bandwidth, so after the site gets to a certain popularity level, you'll need a Content Delivery Network (that's the 'cdn' bit you see in the subdomains of sites doing this kind of stuff). CDNs can be quite expensive at anything between $0.40 to $0.02 per Gigabyte depending on provider and volume. That's just the delivery layer cost omitting marketing, ops, licencing costs to mention a few.

was.deevey

You can buy turnkey video platforms pretty cheap, as Tricky said the cost is going to be in the delivery .. i was pricing up Amazons S3 for a potential Audio sharing social network platform and the cost was astronomical (tens of thousands) once you factor in the bandwidth and storage cost and a hefty server that won't fall over when converting and uploading multiple files simultaneously to the CDN even on a really modest user base.

Now if you plan on users being allowed to post Youtube videos your cost really goes down as does the workload.

Really going to depend if you want the stuff hosted by yourself or not.

Also factor in the Administration work involved, if people are uploading videos which you are hosting you are a big target for copyright infringement, if stuff is hosted on youtube you have a margin of safety.

Feathers

A cheaper solution might be to use YouTube/Vimeo behind the scenes — let people upload via your site & give it a nice wrapper around it, but offload the hosting/streaming.

Also, it means that whoever you are paying is working against a known platform — if you get rid of them later on, it's much easier for someone else to modify/maintain than a bespoke solution.

AFAIK, this should be possible via their APIs though haven't looked into it in depth.

devildriver

As others have mentioned it's important to clarify whether you need the site to actually encode the video files from original footage uploaded by the users.

Depending on the volume this can range from affordable to very expensive.

Some guidelines pricing here:

http://www.encoding.com/pricing/calculator

mneylon

You might be able to find an "off the shelf" bit of software that will do what you want initially - do a search for "Youtube clone"

Cost for developing / tweaking etc - will depend on what you want to spend on it ..

But, as others have pointed out, the real cost with any of these things is going to be the encoding + hosting.

Encoding takes CPU cycles, so while it might not be a problem if you've only got a small number of users it gets expensive pretty quickly when the numbers go up

Same with the hosting - disk space is getting cheaper, but video uses a lot of it and also uses a lot of bandwidth

All of the above is fine *if* you have a viable business model and can generate enough revenue to cover all the costs and make a profit ..

And, as already mentioned, there are potential legal issues, as users have an annoying habit of (un)intentionally uploading copyright works and / or defamatory content