Hey self-hosted community! I thought I’d pose this question to you all as you seem to have a lot of experience with hosting things on limited budgets with usually a single person administering!

I am volunteering with a small rural news organization that operates in my home country. They do rural news for people living in villages and they give people (particularly women) in these villages the opportunity to be reporters. It is a really cool organization that empowers people in these villages through journalism. When they hire a reporter they give them an android-based smartphone and a handheld microphone. The reporters will shoot selfie-style reports, interviews and b-roll in the field and then file the video back to the main office where the videos can be edited. Currently they use whatsapp and signal which has worked decently well but both platforms compress the video a lot so the quality is degraded by the time it is received.

What they need is an easy way to transfer the original video files (usually mp4 h264) over spotty rural cellular networks.

Do you all have any recommendations for protocols or platforms to use? This is an organization with a very limited budget. I was thinking some kind of SFTP server that I could maintain remotely but I do not know if the clients are very robust against network dropouts and also are they easy enough for someone who has grown up in a rural village to learn. I have some IT skills but never tried anything like this.

A secondary issue they have brought up is when the field reporters do file their video in, it is increasingly difficult over time to keep everything organized. The filenames will be something like YYYYMMDD_XXXX.mp4 and the editor has to do a lot of work to organize and rename the files. I know there are MAM (Media asset management) softwares out there but from cursory googling it seems like a lot of the solutions out there are really built for large organizations that can pay a lot of money for the hardware/software. Is there any software that could automatically file away these videos possibly based on who is sending them or maybe the if the metadata has location data in it?

Any advice would be welcome!