Over the last 5 months we have been offering a custom streaming service to several members. Although it’s improvable, it’s a service that works if you know how to handle it. The question now becomes whether we can offer this as a standard and for what price.
Note that the streaming server goes separate, both technically as commercially from the BBB server. It can be deployed together with a Greenlight multiuser instance (on the same virtual machine or seperate?)
So far we have sold it on a case by case basis:
Cities for Change: included in dedicated BBB server price (290Eur/month)
BBK Open Science Festival: 250 EUR/month (not sold)
Screenwalk / The Photograhphy Gallery: 250 Eur/month
Degrowth Conference: 45 Eur/month
about the last one, Degrowth Conf, this one has been using the dedicated server infra from Cities for Change, but they paid for some additional servers including the Streaming server. @dvdjaco could you confirm the cost structure and setup of the streaming part here?
Would it be feasible to offer streaming as an addon option for multiuser accounts and/or for the event server for an additional cost of 45 EUR? Does that make sense from a market perspective and from a tech/cost perspective?
We have one new multiuser signup (Frequence Commune) this week, who specifically ask for this. Let me know what addon price I can quote them for the Streaming.
The Degrowth conference was almost an extension of the Cities for Change contract. Moreover they asked for extra capacity which most probably they wouldn’t need, so we waived part of the setup fees. The streaming service was quoted at 45€/month, setup included in the front-end setup. The final quote is here: https://cloud.meet.coop/f/63737
In our current setup, the streaming service runs alongside Greenlight and accesses BBB via the API. We can run multiple Greenlight instances in the same server, and multiple streaming controllers (for multiple Greenlight instances).
As we have discussed before, the feature is still a bit rough but stable enough for production use. The one piece we’re missing is a way to limit the number of rooms that can be streamed at the same time from each GL instance, to avoid impact on the performance of the service if the user were to start too many streams.
Maybe we should mention in the conditions that no more than 1 (or 2?) parallel live streams should be running, or a dedicated server should be contracted.
I think the key here is that aim to offer an ongoing service and not a one-off custom service. In the latter we assign setup costs, while in the ongoing standard server we do without them, but require a minimum of 3 months.
All this said, is the 45€/month addon reasonable for us and them? Good enough for now to offer to Frequence Commune? They are waiting for knowing our price on this, be it standard or not yet standard.
just to check base on this private thread: tomorrow I’ll go to the 12h meeting with ECF. Main thing from our side that we need to have clarity on is the SETUP COSTS.
In above scenario we have discussed streaming as a standard service for 45€/month, but without setup costs - if people commit to 3 months duration. If not, we’ll have to charge setup. How much? If 100€ setup then they’d best go for 3 months subscription any way
For us however it’ll be different if we set them up temporarily on a temp container or vm, than compared to one vm with GL + streaming server together (as @yurko points out on the public matrix room).
Yet another scenario is that people contract the event server with streaming server included (that’s the new normal now, yes do we agree on that? ;-)) But the event server is much more expensive (100 GBP/wk + 100 setup)
We don’t currently have the capacity to deploy VMs on meet.coop’s infrastructure, since we decomissioned the servers we had deployed for Cities4Change. Our current infra is managed by Collocall (except for the monitoring and demo servers).
The event server has also been provided by Collocall until now.
We will discuss with the tech circle the work it would involve decoupling from Collocall while maintaining the current level of service (eg we need to improve monitoring and set up alerting, agree on incident response protocol and responsibilities, etc.)
I see. It keeps me wondering how we had envisioned to operationalise the streaming service we discuss in this thread… If you have any further info before the 12h ECF meet today, that’d be wonderful.
WRT the idea of recovering control over our services and have some key infrastructure we manage ourselves, that would be a major step forward. Virtually every time we discuss any improvement to our services we touch upon this. But we’d have to have a clear idea that we are capable of doing so and how much effort it would cost to set up and to maintain. Can we discuss this during All Hands today?
