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Will Open Source Streaming Save You Money?

Learn more about open source streaming solutions at the next Streaming Media West.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Rema Morgan-Aluko: Depending on your team and what your bread and butter is, maybe it makes sense to use open source because you'll have control over that thing. Where it's not your bread and butter, it's totally okay to have another solution do that for you. Maybe that's where you go commercial. If you make the wrong choice, sometimes the money that you spend ... Let's say you select a commercial solution and it does about 80% of the things you needed to do well in order to integrate the extra 20%, that actually is more expensive and takes more time. And all of a sudden you're over budget and you've picked something that didn't necessarily work. Also think about your team, what your expertise is, where you want to actually spend your time and help that make the decision. And, and I think that can help you decide how much money you're, you're actually going to be spending on these solutions.

Jason Thibeault: I think Yuriy actually said that earlier too. He said, "Ask yourself, is this your core expertise?" Steve, maybe you can add to this. When you were at Zencoder, I mean, I can't imagine Zencoder being built on a bunch of Harmonic or Elemental boxes, right? Your core business was transcoding.

Steve Heffernan: To address the question of when you use open source, is it actually saving money? I would say when it works like that, that's not the whole point, but that's a big part of it, right? When it works, it works. Then it becomes this kind of gray area where you're evaluating, if it's not going to work, how much effort am I going to end up putting into it? That's hard to figure out, exactly. So I think about, you have all these like no.js modules out there that do little things. And we've had tons of projects where you're looking for one small thing to do and it's going to take you four hours to write it, but because there's something out there that just does it cleanly and easily, you can just drop it in and never think about it again. Iteratively, those small projects ultimately add up to saving a ton of time, a ton of money. It gets more challenging when you get into the bigger projects that are trying to do a lot of things. Do they do everything that you need?

Jason Thibeault: That is the basis behind a lot of C programming, right? It's all library. It's all modular. You just drop it in. It's like, "I don't have to program that! Somebody already did it."

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