GoVideo: self-hosted-feeling video for your Ghost site

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Hi all — I’ve been building GoVideo, and Ghost sites are the case it fits best, so I wanted to put it in front of this crowd specifically.

The problem it solves: you want video in a post, and the options are all compromises. YouTube puts its branding, its recommended videos and sometimes its ads inside your post. Vimeo and Wistia work well but get expensive fast. Uploading the file directly means one big MP4 that stalls on a phone.

What GoVideo does: you upload a file (or go live from your browser) and get back an embed snippet you paste into a Ghost HTML card. The video gets encoded into several sizes, so each reader’s device plays the quality their connection can handle instead of buffering. The player is yours, your colours, your watermark, your cover image — with nothing suggesting other people’s videos at the end.

A few things that matter for a publication:

  • The embed reflects your current settings. Change your branding and every post you’ve already published updates itself. You don’t re-paste anything.
  • Chapters on the seekbar, so a long piece is navigable.
  • Captions, addable to any video, including ones you uploaded months ago.
  • Analytics per video: plays, unique viewers, hours watched, by country.
  • Unlisted by default. Videos don’t show up in search or any public index; they live where you embed them.

It’s free while it’s in preview.

I’d like feedback from people actually running Ghost publications: what breaks for you with video today? And if you’ve moved off YouTube or Vimeo for your posts, what made you switch?

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I ask respectfully, because I’m intrigued to know your perspective: how does one explain a self-hosted-feeling?

Either it’s self-hosted from an open repository, or it’s a closed-source tool that is NOT self-hosted.

I think we need to maintain and respect the FOSS philosophy. You can offer whatever you want without trying to feel like something you are not building at all. You are in or you are out.

I closed the tab on your site immediately upon seeing that there is no public repository. I understand that the marketing approach you proposed is counter-intuitive and counter-productive. I suggest editing the title of this post and privately reflecting on what led you to it.

Just my two cents. You can take it or leave it.

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Honestly, self hosted means you host the entire stack. If this isn’t that, then this is not self hosted and is misleading from the beginning.

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