A big part of successfully managing your business online is having the right set of tools, aka a tech stack, that you use to market your business. Part of building your tech stack means regularly evaluating the tools you’re using to make sure they offer the best value to your business. That value can be measured in several ways: Features and benefits, cost effectiveness, efficiency, ease-of-use, etc.
I recently discovered an incredibly valuable addition to my tech stack that not only lowered my costs but improved my workflows and my website’s overall efficiency: Bunny.net. I’ve written several articles on Bunny Net’s CDN, and using it with Presto Player to help you play videos.
Introducing Bunny Stream
Bunny.net just got a whole lot better with the addition of video streaming and transcoding enhancements.
Bunny Stream is the brand new video hosting and streaming solution from Bunny.net that gives you total control over your video hosting. Now you can transcode and optimize your videos for the web without having to optimize them through a tool like Handbrake before uploading. Bunny Stream will also serve up multiple resolutions of your video to give you viewers the best experience for their internet connection.
Bunny Stream Walkthrough
I created a complete tutorial and walkthrough so that you can get your Bunny Stream account up and running in minutes.
Organize Videos in Folders
The interface for organizing videos is incredibly useful for course creators. Anyone looking to organize videos by grouping them into folders will find everything they need with Bunny Stream.
Choose your GEO Locations for Storage
Since Bunny Stream is built right into the CDN aspect of Bunny.net, your videos can be served up from multiple geographic areas so that your visitors have the fastest viewing experience. NOTE: When you turn on a geographic area, you CAN’T turn it off.
Customize Resolutions Offered
If your viewers are mainly mobile users or in areas with poor connections, you may wish to offer lower resolution formats. Bunny Stream allows you to offer baseline standard quality all the way up to 4k video. Each format will use more storage since your video is transcoded to the proper size.
Enable DRM / Security for Your Videos
Worried about people ripping off your content? Enable Bunny Stream’s video security called MediaCage DRM which acts just like HLS security. People won’t be able to steal your content.
NOTE: MediaCage is not supported by iOS at the time of writing this post (the week Bunny Stream came out). I reached out to Bunny.net support and they told me they’re working on a fix. It has something to do with iOS not liking security features on third-party players.
Block Downloading / Direct Link Access
Smart thieves like to run your site through a tool that downloads your video directly, or use the inspect tool to snag your video file link and access it directly. Bunny Stream lets you turn off direct access to your files.
Enable MP4 Fallback
If for any reason your video doesn’t load in the format requested, there’s an instant fallback option that will load the MP4 version of your file. This is completely vulnerable to download, however, and your content CAN be stolen.
Save Hundreds, even Thousands of Dollars with Bunny Stream
If you’re a course creator or someone who uses a lot of video in your online business, you know that video hosting can be pricey. Wistia is going to cost you literally thousands. Vimeo will cost you hundreds and eventually thousands. Youtube isn’t secure.
Bunny Stream will cost most people $1 a month or less (because they have a $1 minimum across all of Bunny.net).
My bill for ALL of my courses and websites on Bunny.net right now is barely $1. My courses are using like $70 cents/month.
All of that security, speed, performance, and easy-of-use for that price? That’s a smart business decision.