Alternatives
Products that do what Infstream – We’re trying to fix video monetization for creators does
TL;DR: https://infstream.com/?code=HN Hi HN – we’re Ben & Callum from Infstream. We’ve always been heavy users of YouTube, for entertainment, education and sharing. Towards the end of last year, we saw more and more horror stories of YouTubers losing their livelihood to the ad algorithm. We decided to build a content-first video platform, which aims to reduce issues by removing advertisers from the equation. Instead, we charge for the content you watch – bold, I know. Instead of paying in advertising and data, users on Infstream build their own streaming package, a channel at…
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- 2VM
2020 · infstream.com
- 3WS
Hey HN!! Many of us enjoyed the "If YouTube had actual channels" Show HN post last week. As developers of a similar project, we wanted to share our approach to building a simulated live experience. We’ve spent around 18 months working on this and have managed to add some advanced features, including content-based interactivity. We are super excited to be releasing both the live stream and the code behind it. Our idea was to combine the communal watching experience of television with the modern trappings of the interactive web. If you go to the stream, you will be watching along with everyone…
2024 · github.com
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- 5IM
Just wanted to share with you something I built. If you’re a creator or someone who financially supports creators, this will be of interest to you. Qufro.com is a site where creators can monetise their fan interactions. It works this way: A creator sets an amount for answering fan questions. A fan posts a question or a comment and is only charged if the creator responds. From the fan’s perspective, we’re solving the following problem: Not all fans want to commit to a monthly subscription (e.g., on Patreon) to support their favourite creators. With Patreon, ko-fi, etc., there is also no…
2023 · qufro.com
- 6DL
We've just launched our new, three-headed API (part of which is an open WebSocket server) and we'd like to thank this community for the all the help, feedback and inspiration. Ducksboard launched as a Show HN and countless hours that should've been dedicated to developing the product went into browsing the site (until we discovered noprocrast, yay!) For the next 24 hours we're giving away free, full-featured plans to everyone with a HN account more than 10 days old, sign up at https://app.ducksboard.com/signup/hn/ These plans will always be free, but we can't promise we won't try to upsell…
2012
- 7FO
HN, I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready. We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback. Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance. The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written…
2013
- 8IS
Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount. And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient. I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance. This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 9IJ
Hey HN! I've been working on Muxamp for over a year now, and I decided that there's no point in keeping the source closed. (I never planned on making money from it.) I've learned a lot since I started, and I hope others can benefit from its release--and perhaps teach me a thing or two as well :)
2013 · github.com
- 10TE
I have been running some experiments on twitch.tv along the lines of driving traffic to websites via donations. Many streamers will read a message attached to a donation of a certain amount of money on stream in front of all their viewers. Sometimes they will visit a url if that happens to be in the content of the message. On rare occasions they will even share the url with the rest of the stream. I would consider my most recent experiment a success. I follow and watch a few streamers on twitch that play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Three of the streamers I watch recently created a…
2015
- 11FT
Over the past year I uploaded a bunch of videos to my personal channel. Most of them were short documentaries, news-style edits, or content covering current events and war. A lot of it ended up getting demonetized, age-restricted, or removed completely, usually without any clear reason or explanation. The worst part was not knowing what caused it. You upload something, it seems fine for a while, and then it disappears or gets buried. I spent days editing videos that ended up dead in the water because of things I couldn’t see coming. I started building a tool to help with this. Just something…
2025 · frametwo.com
- 12BA
Been in the AI image gen space since 2023, before even GPT image gen was a thing, and after spending ~9K on Facebook ads for my own projects (made a video about that actually) I realized the thing I kept getting stuck on was the creatives themselves. I'm horrible at making reels-type video ads and Canva even with templates is surprisingly complicated for ad-specific stuff, plus everything ends up looking the same as everyone else using the same templates. Made a video going into detail about the full FB ads journey if anyone's interested:…
Mar 2026 · admakeai.com
- 13OS
Hi there HN! I'm Matthias and I've been into video streaming for quite a while now. Over the years I've built plenty of small setups, often CLI tools to test and debug streaming video. About a month ago, during my annual holiday, I started working on a simple API on top of my CLI tools. It's time consuming to craft and run multiple ffmpeg jobs, get GOP / keyframes right, merge playlists, package to HLS, ... One thing led to another and I eventually started exploring HLS interstitials, VMAP / VAST and dynamic ad insertion, MSE / EME (HLS.js in general), React (perf) as a player…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’m Ashu, founder of VideoDB. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life building video infrastructure. Not video creation. Video plumbing. The stuff you only learn after production breaks: timebases, VFR, keyframes, audio sync drift, container quirks, partial uploads, live streams, retries, backpressure, codecs, ffmpeg flags, cost blowups, and “why is this clip unseekable on one player but fine on another”. This week we shared VideoDB Skills, a skill pack that lets AI agents call those infra primitives directly, instead of you wiring pipelines with screenshots plus FFmpeg glue. Repo:…
Mar 2026
- 15SH
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JtFBkrFNYWk https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z3oZwV78m-c https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gqta_wJILuE (and so on)
2022
- 16MA
Hi there, So a buddy a couple of days ago came up with the idea for a new SaaS product regarding gpt and image generation. We did a quick MVP that barely works, it breaks almost 50% of the time but we still wanted to validate the idea before going all in. We have almost 1k followers on Twitter together. Did a quick post describing the idea with a stripe link in the comments with a 5$ value, no landing page, and no shipped product. In exchange, the buyers become beta users. Around 30 mins later we got our first sale next 30 mins another 5$ and so on. Do we consider the idea validated? The…
2023
- 17OS
We did a "Show HN post" 6 months back of our startup and we're very excited to show everyone how far we've come as well as the lessons we've learnt so far! It's been a roller-coaster so far and we think there's lot more of the same to come! We did apply for Ycombinator funding but got turned down :( But may re-apply soon :) For those that don't know, our startup is called Scirra and we make Construct 2 which is an HTML5 game engine (http://www.scirra.com). Our engine allows anyone to make HTML5 games without knowing any programming. It's only me and my brother working on this and we're based…
2012
- 18IB
I built this as a Garage Project over the weekend. https://x402.backpac.xyz/ Still working on refining things, but let me know your thoughts. Cheers.
Sep 2025
- 19EV
This extension will replace videos on websites with a custom one that use download acceleration to prebuffer as you watch. It works on most websites, including Youtube. Fortuitously, it is also able to bypass Youtube's anti-adblock shenanigans. I started this project in high school to fix the terrible video players used on most websites. Since then, I've received a lot of feedback from my users and FastStream has improved significantly. Now that most bugs have been ironed out, I think I am ready to share it here on HN. It is still undergoing rapid development (multiple releases every week),…
2023 · faststream.online
- 20ML
I made a post a few days ago asking if any software companies/start ups needed technical video tutorial writers and I had a few very interested and serious respondents email me. I've been looking for something to do with this domain hence I give myself a Christmas present.
2013 · helpknow.com
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Hey everyone, my friend and I created a GitHub Wrapped video for developers to showcase their activity on the platform in a more fun way. The implementation is open-source (https://github.com/rendleyhq/github-wrapped-2024) if you're interested in how it was built. To get a bit geeky, we used masks, keyframe animations, luma key shaders to remove the background from the confetti video, and some other techniques. Also, everything is rendered directly in the browser!! I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the rendering performance, especially if you're running this on your…
2024 · rendley.com
- 22WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 23BA
Hey HN, I'm Mehul, founder of codedamn. I'm glad to release codedamn creator (https://creator.codedamn.com/) in public beta today - the first (and only?) interactive course creating platform available to create truly interactive programming courses. Unlike existing solutions of embedding iframes from different code execution services, we have built the whole system from the ground up - allowing the course students to work inside a powerful in-browser editor solving code challenges. This will enable you to create highly interactive courses on virtually any topic. Want to teach…
2021
- 24IM
Hey folks! My weekend project, Summify.io, has officially launched! It's an AI-driven tool that simplifies your life by summarizing YouTube videos in just a single click. Now, you can get the gist of those long vids without breaking a sweat! Built from the ground up as a solo developer, it's been an incredible journey full of late nights, countless coffees, and the spirit of indie hacking The amazing response from our private release has motivated me on to start building even more features. Can't wait for you to check it out and share your thoughts! Try Summify.io now and let's me know what…
2023 · summify.io
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