Bunny Stream just reached 1 million videos! What's next?

Just 4 months ago, we released Bunny Stream, with a vision to make online video delivery at scale as simple as possible. Despite the short timeframe, we are incredibly excited to see the interest in the service and announce we've just hit our first major milestone, 1 million videos!

By combining transcoding, storage, CDN, and a video player into one simple package, it was our goal to remove the complexity of video delivery. We also made a bold decision to provide all transcoding features completely free of charge with no monthly minimums or extra costs and we are very happy to have done so. After some growing pains, today, we have almost 100 servers continuously hopping along to make sure videos are processed as soon as possible and keep up with the influx of new uploads.

We are delighted to see Bunny Stream grow and allow more and more developers to easily handle video delivery. While we celebrate the milestone we've reached, we also want to take this opportunity to explore what's coming next.

After all, we are just getting started. After a few months of collecting feedback, we have a busy roadmap ahead with a goal to continue improving Bunny Stream and make video delivery even better.

Player Events & Control Library

The built-in Bunny Stream player works through an iframe, which makes communication through JavaScript a bit more complex. To make this more simple, we are working on a new JavaScript library to allow developers to easily pause, play or skip through videos, get callbacks from the player and get more control over the playback.

For more complex scenarios, you can, of course, always use the raw m3u8 playlist files and get full control of the playback in your own player.

MediaCage Performance Improvements

The MediaCage DRM system uses an ongoing communication logic between our authorization servers and the end player to fetch encryption keys. This was currently based in a single region in Europe, which meant viewers far way might have experienced less than ideal performance when skipping through videos.

To address this, we are moving the DRM system to the edge to greatly reduce the latency. This will ensure a seamless experience, no matter where your viewers are.

UI Improvements

We originally designed Bunny Stream without the idea of folders, but it quickly became apparent this was a very much needed feature. To address that, we added a new system of collections, allowing you to organized videos better. However, doing so, we ended up creating a less than great UI and user experience.

We are currently in the process of redesigning and improving the visual experience of the video manager, to make things cleaner and easier to use.

More Settings & More Analytics

We are working on adding per-video based view counts, more playback settings and more analytics. We are starting simple, but if there are any metrics you would really like to see such as watch time, make sure to let us know.

Transcoding Speed Improvements

As you can imagine, processing tens of thousands of videos per day is a very compute intensive task. Initially, we've had some growing pains, but we have been on top of this and continue to add new hardware to make sure this is a seamless experience.

Custom Domains

Bunny Stream provides a built-in video player, but also allows you to use the raw video files just as easily. We understand branding is important and as a popular request, we are working on allowing you to use custom domain names for the CDN hostnames when delivering your videos.

API Improvements

One of the issues we've seen with the API were less than ideal upload speeds. We are currently working on multiple updates to allow faster uploading, better video fetching and even more simple API calls. One of our updates already improved upload speeds up to 5X when uploading outside of Europe.

Live Streaming

Funnily enough, Bunny Stream does not currently allow live video streaming. But we are excited to say that this is coming in the near future. It's our vision to provide a truly global low latency streaming experience without buffering, delays or latency issues. For that, we will be taking a heavy advantage of our global network and some clever routing logic. We don't have a release date just yet, but it's definitely coming!

If you're struggling with live streaming, drop us a message. We would love to hear how we can help.

Hopping on!

We are continuing our mission to help make the internet hop faster, so if you have any feedback, suggestions or issues that you're facing, let us know! We are all ears and eager to continue bringing more and more value.