Hey Everyone,
Thank you for your enthusiastic response! I’ve gone through the posts and collected a list of questions. Here we go...
Merchandise:
I’m down with getting some online merchandising going. The Zazzle seems to be good, though I haven’t looked in depth at the site. Anything where we don’t have to keep an inventory is good. CafePress still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Streaming Videos:
Will streaming videos be hard to make? Each video that is uploaded can automatically be converted to a unified streaming format by the server itself. These cached streaming files will be uniform so there won't be any "you didn't encode your streaming file correctly" problems on the video creator’s end.
What about streaming quality? Teh Tube = teh sux0rz. They are a really good example of bad streaming. Vimeo much closer to what we are going for. Here is an example of typical Vimeo video quality:
http://vimeo.com/877053 Even maximized to full screen, the quality is really decent. These streams are automatically created by their server; the member just uploads one file in any format.
Will the streaming video files kill storage space? Streaming video files will be smaller than the original upload (assuming you created a quality video file). We estimate that the streaming files will take an additional 20% of server space. This means with our existing 3TB of videos, we will have to use an additional 600GB for the streaming files.
Won’t streaming videos kill our bandwidth? Since streaming files are smaller than actual downloads, they have the potential to actually reduce our bandwidth usage (though bandwidth usage is not a problem). Since we have fixed hosting costs, bandwidth can be thought of as a "renewable" resource while storage space is a "non-renewable" resource. If we hypothetically max out our bandwidth today, there’s just as much bandwidth available tomorrow to do it again at no additional cost. If we use up our storage space today, there will be no more available tomorrow and it will cost us to get some more. Our current daily bandwidth usage is about 1/3 of our max.
As an added bonus to donators, we could allow embedded streaming video on external member sites.
Server Auction:
What are these "best" videos that you speak of? The star rating system would be used to calculate the videos that go onto the drives. The rating is fairly accurate as far as general public likes/dislikes. You specific opinion may vary. What I would do is order all the videos from highest to lowest rating, make a batch file to copy them over, allow the batch file to run, and you get what you get. I generally arrange the videos using the same directory structure as the site currently uses and attach a index data file that can be imported into Excel, Access, or whatever else you want.
Can we make the hard drive auction thing more than just a one-time deal? My initial reaction is "not really". It requires physical media to be mailed, filled up, and mailed again. This is hardly an automatic or trivial thing to do. Having it as a one-time event to specifically upgrade our servers is fine with me. I have put up similar hard drives into anime convention charity auctions and they fetch a couple hundred bucks each there.
Donator Perks:
What about [insert perk here]? Most of the donator perks mentioned here are really good ideas. Again, the more non-admin-involved the perk is, the better (IMHO). Most of the ones mentioned can be implemented. Some members love perks as donation incentives; some don’t care at all. We just need to find the balance of implementation time vs. perk usefulness/popularity and get them in.
Next Steps:
I will get with Derobert to confirm the quantity, type, and capacity of the hard drives we have in our servers now. Once we have that list, we can start the auctioning process. Just as a reminder to the obvious, we will need to get the auction funds received, new server ordered, implemented, videos copied over, and then old server removed before we can actually fill and send out the drives to the winners.
We will also go over the list of suggested donator perks, figure out how useful/popular they are, how hard they are to implement, and then start getting them going.
I hope this helps. This seems to be a really good discussion! Keep going!!
Thanks again and have a great day!! ^_^
Phade.