Hey guys, I am a NextJs Dev. I want to make and anime streaming website. Ofcourse I am totally broke. I can’t afford a database. Even if I could how does that work anyways? I mean, do I have to upload every single anime?? That sounds like a lot of work. How do sites like zoro or 9anime deal with it? Do they have their own db? I thought about webscrapping but I am not sure how it’s done, if anybody could explain in detail I would be grateful. I am trying to understand how those stuffs really work. Also, I know an api called Consumet but I want to be able to make my own! I am working on a french anime website so I need to figure out how I can get the animes.
My previous website using Consumet API (still works check it out :)) https://poketv.vercel.app/
I don’t intend to sound mean, but to be frank, you’re far off ever starting such a website. Given your knowledge, I’d also recommend staying away from such a project until you have more experience in the relevant fields. The reason for this is that there’s a number of intricacies you need to be careful of when building a piracy streaming platform (both technicalities, logistics, and what sort of negative attention you could bring), which you probably won’t pick up if this is your first project.
Having said that, I’d start at looking at back-end dev - this will give you a greater amount of knowledge. After that, you can decide how to approach the problem, e.g. if you’re scraping another website, you’ll need some way of pulling data on the back end (either on the fly, or via some periodic task).
Another aspect to consider would be the logistics, e.g. if you want to host the video files yourself, what sort of bandwidth would be necessary for a certain degree of traffic.
Then assuming you can solve all the technical problems, next to consider is maintenance, promotion and funding.
Yeah you are right! I honestly just want to understand how it works. I need to know that I have the skills to make it. I am looking for those skills. What you said made me question my skills as a full stack tho 😂 I am gonna have to learn more stuffs about backend.
Now, taking in account the fact that I am not trying to make money out of it of build a website that can replace Zoro or 9anime. Suppose, I am trying to build that website just for me and a few friends. You mentioned scraping, should I use a language like python or puppeter (nodejs). Or a software or tool that can do it?
Language is mostly a concern that newbies have. Experienced developers will often say it doesn’t matter much, so just use whatever suits you.
There’s all sorts of tools/libraries out there that can assist with scraping, or you may decide to roll everything on your own. Every developer will have their own preferences, so find what works for you.
A big part of this would depend on what you’re aiming to get out of the experience. If it’s just for personal education, you might want to take an approach that’s more conducive to learning what you want to know. On the other hand, if you’re more interested in completing a project, you might focus less on learning and more on getting the project done.
If you’re aiming for a private site, it removes a lot of concerns you need to have with a “real” (public) site, simplifying things greatly.
You should look in to Usenet + Indexers + Sonarr + Plex.
There are quite a few different guides on the subject. Basically, you would use Usenet as the backend source. Sonarr would be the application to grab all the files and automate downloading. Plex would be used for sharing. It’s a whole rabbit hole.
Assuming you do succeed, if you’re totally broke, how do you plan to fund the website?
I am trying to do it without needing to fund the website. My first try was https://poketv.vercel.app/ (which I probably should have mentioned in the post). I didn’t have to pay anything because I used consumet api. Now I am self hosting the API since they are shutting down.
naturally if you want to provide access to video files you need to host the video files somewhere. for big anime streaming sites, yes, they go through and upload each one. zoro and 9anime iirc have tools to automatically grab from other sites/hosts and reupload.
Please, can you tell me more about the tools they use? What file hosting service would you recommend??
You could just use jellyfin as backend and build another or even better frontend for it. AFAIK there is a vue frontend for it as an example.
I don’t want to sound mean and defeatist, but steaming service is very expensive to run due to the sheer amount of bandwidth and storage cost required. You can host standard website for free these days, but video hosting is another story.
Consider a standard 1080p video stream @ 16mbps. If your server has 1gbps bandwidth, you can only serve 62 people at the same time. You’re going to need more and more bandwidth as your users grow or they’ll get irritated and leave because your servers don’t have enough bandwidth to serve videos to all of them (lots of buffering and timeouts).
So how much will those bandwidth cost you? If you plan to host them in a cloud provider, you should know that they’ll usually charge by the amount of egress traffics you consume. If you maxed out a 1gbps link for a month in an AWS server, Amazon will charge you around $0.1 per GB, which means you’ll get a hefty $32,400 at the end of the month for delivering 324TB of traffics.
Now AWS is literally the most expensive provider in term of bandwidth, so you might want to use a provider that provides unmetered billing. This usually means traditional colocation service where you buy your own physical servers and only pay for electricity and internet, or renting out dedicated servers which will cost a lot upfront but ended up being cheaper than pay as you go cloud providers. But you’ll still looking to pay thousands $ each months to pay for the bandwidth.
Some pirate streaming sites cheats by uploading their videos into various cloud file storage such as Google drive and playing cat and mouse by constantly creating a new account and reuploading their videos when when their account for banned for violating tos. You might be tempted to go that route as well, but considering how you’re already sweating at the prospect of finding and uploading all anime files yourself, constantly creating a new cloud storage account and constantly reuploading your anime files doesn’t sound really great, right? Some pirate streaming sites literally have full time staff doing this stuff all day, constantly keeping up with new anime release, downloading them released schene torrents or ripping them out from Crunchyroll, then uploading to a cloud storage account or other video hosting services (and reuploading again if it were taken down due to tos violation).
I think this project is way too big for you right now, but pretty fun to think about especially the logistics part.
Thank you for your opinion and yeah you’re right! This is a lot of work and probably not something I can do right now I did learn new stuffs tho so it’s cool.
My advise if you want to work on a personal project which can be tied to piracy or copyright infringement is to avoid associating your real identity to it. I heard too many stories about experienced devs not getting any job offers or otherwise shafted due to past involvements with these kind of projects. For example, people suspect that Microsoft’s decision cancel AppGet acquisition (and create WinGet instead) and shafted its developer (forcing him to kill AppGet) was due to his past contribution to Sonarr (a popular tool than can be used for piracy mentioned by others in this thread).
