At this point - unless there’s a very good reason - I just don’t interact with YouTube’s site or app anymore.
I hope YouTube pulls a Reddit, and federated video services get the same bump. Creators can plug NordVPN, Brilliant, and Wix just as well on PeerTube, and we won’t have to watch dumbass political ads anymore.
I’ve heard that yt handles around 3PB of new uploads daily. A 10TB drive is optimistically ~250$, so if you want to seriously compete with youtube, without taking into account data redundancy and, you know, actual servers and traffic, you’re looking at a bare minimum of 75000$ of new hardware each day. No one can afford to burn that much money other than google.
I’ve made most of my arguments in other replies, but here I’ll just say this: Most of what is on YouTube is worthless garbage.
They’ve developed a business model around being the garbage collector and storage provider for home movies, dipshits that want to be viral by pranking people, your cousin’s drum solo during their recital, every awful cover of all of your favorite songs, and some guy’s unhinged political rant (recorded in his den at 2am)
I think maybe it would be ok if they posted their stuff to some federated provider that charged a few bucks per gigabyte. They sure wouldn’t lose money on bandwidth; the videos wont get viewed more than once. If that.
As for actual creators? They’ll be able to self host, or band together and make mini-services funded by like-minded fans (and probably some sponsors, because capitalism), and everyone will be able to access everything on an interconnected… what’s the word? Oh yeah, “Internet”. You know, the thing we had before 12 companies took over everything.
Those creator services exist (e.g. nebula) and are great, but they usually cost money, because video hosting is apparently too expensive to just run on donations, and competing with google on advertising is even more of an uphill battle
I currently support Nebula. That was easy money to spend, unlike the prospect of giving YouTube anything.
Also - since they actually curate their content - there’s less of it, and higher quality. Kinda speaks to some of both our points. If they had a policy of “free to all, after a while” (like a lot of patreon people do), they might well have attempted some kind of distributed hosting. Hard to say for sure, but a guy can dream.
Federated video streaming may not have all the questions answered right now, but people are already attempting it. I think the right optimizations, the right content, and the right audience will push it really far. And maybe it won’t be “YouTube quality” for a while (or ever), but who needs 4k60 Minecraft/Fortnight lets-plays anyway?
There are already lots of places to post low value video. Basically, every social media site out there let’s you post the home movie you want your friends to see and don’t care if any stranger ever sees it.
I have a YouTube channel. It was created as part of an experiment that failed. I think I might have a total of 4 videos posted there. If it comes right down to it, the traffic I expect for my personal projects means I could just post any videos I create directly on my website.
And that personal website is where we need to get back to. I wish all the fancy programmers at Meta and elsewhere would just put their energies into creating the tools that let people put content on their own site as easily as on Facebook. Add some semi-structured data that can be leveraged by displaying the results of pre-built custom web searches and you should be able to approximate the experience of Facebook.
That’s one of the use-cases I’ve had in mind. You have your site, you have a video. If you posted your video to your site though PeerTube (or really any implementation of ActivityPub), both your direct site viewers AND anyone searching PeerTube (et al) would see it.
If lots of people did that, you have a basis for a version of distributed YouTube. Small creators’ (or people just messing around) videos might load slower or only have lower bandwidth options (resolution), but larger, focused creators (CorridorCrew, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, etc) would have more options through viewer support and collaborations.
I don’t have experience with any of those, YouTube is still ad free for me luckily, but how plausible would a completely peer hosted video streaming service be? Like TOR based or something like that where it’s the collective of all the users hosting.
Realistically? Virtually impossible. Youtube handles petabytes of data daily, and just the storage capacity would burn the money of everyone but the big corporations. There simply isn’t a way to compete with a corporation that can afford to throw millions at a machine that doesn’t make profit enough to cover those massive costs.
You’re considering only the prospect of doing things the YouTube way, as a service owned and operated by a single entity. As my dad was known to say “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” Who knows whether that is literally true, but the metaphor has proven accurate every time someone finds a different, often better, way to do something.
It’s not just plausible, it already exists. See joinpeertube.org . There are more than 1000 instances already. Just need more content creators (some are already dual-posting, or migrated entirely).
There’s also LBRY, but it operates on some goofy-ass crypto scheme, so I assume it will fail.
Dope, I’ll check it out, although it might be slow growth right now, YouTube for a lot of people like me is hard to break. I’ve got years and years of saved videos, subscriptions, watch history, etc.
I 100% agree. Right now, people are just kind of mildly irritated. My irritation is more than mild, hence my leaving entirely.
I’m just speculating now, but it’s possible that the Google anti-trust might result in YouTube spinning off again. If they also see that coming, they might be trying to backstop it while they still have time and resources to try things (cutting off adblockers, increasing premium fees, they already changed how rev-sharing eligibility and payouts work, etc).
There’s a high chance that they’re going to make the wrong move and piss everyone off, or people will just stop putting up with 2 minutes of unskippable ads before, then again during, then after each video. Content will start getting pirated en masse, advertiserzers will drop (or pay less, or force even more ads to compensate, which is what already happened), and the cycle will continue and get worse until the service just collapses under it’s own weight.
Something will take it’s place. Probably multiple things. I just hope federated services are among them. Hell, people adopted Crypto ferociously, which was extremely expensive and completely useless. Even if federated video is expensive, at least it does something.
At this point - unless there’s a very good reason - I just don’t interact with YouTube’s site or app anymore.
I hope YouTube pulls a Reddit, and federated video services get the same bump. Creators can plug NordVPN, Brilliant, and Wix just as well on PeerTube, and we won’t have to watch dumbass political ads anymore.
You underestimate the cost and complexity of video streaming.
I can assure you, I do not.
I’ve heard that yt handles around 3PB of new uploads daily. A 10TB drive is optimistically ~250$, so if you want to seriously compete with youtube, without taking into account data redundancy and, you know, actual servers and traffic, you’re looking at a bare minimum of 75000$ of new hardware each day. No one can afford to burn that much money other than google.
I’ve made most of my arguments in other replies, but here I’ll just say this: Most of what is on YouTube is worthless garbage.
They’ve developed a business model around being the garbage collector and storage provider for home movies, dipshits that want to be viral by pranking people, your cousin’s drum solo during their recital, every awful cover of all of your favorite songs, and some guy’s unhinged political rant (recorded in his den at 2am)
I think maybe it would be ok if they posted their stuff to some federated provider that charged a few bucks per gigabyte. They sure wouldn’t lose money on bandwidth; the videos wont get viewed more than once. If that.
As for actual creators? They’ll be able to self host, or band together and make mini-services funded by like-minded fans (and probably some sponsors, because capitalism), and everyone will be able to access everything on an interconnected… what’s the word? Oh yeah, “Internet”. You know, the thing we had before 12 companies took over everything.
Those creator services exist (e.g. nebula) and are great, but they usually cost money, because video hosting is apparently too expensive to just run on donations, and competing with google on advertising is even more of an uphill battle
I currently support Nebula. That was easy money to spend, unlike the prospect of giving YouTube anything.
Also - since they actually curate their content - there’s less of it, and higher quality. Kinda speaks to some of both our points. If they had a policy of “free to all, after a while” (like a lot of patreon people do), they might well have attempted some kind of distributed hosting. Hard to say for sure, but a guy can dream.
Federated video streaming may not have all the questions answered right now, but people are already attempting it. I think the right optimizations, the right content, and the right audience will push it really far. And maybe it won’t be “YouTube quality” for a while (or ever), but who needs 4k60 Minecraft/Fortnight lets-plays anyway?
There are already lots of places to post low value video. Basically, every social media site out there let’s you post the home movie you want your friends to see and don’t care if any stranger ever sees it.
I have a YouTube channel. It was created as part of an experiment that failed. I think I might have a total of 4 videos posted there. If it comes right down to it, the traffic I expect for my personal projects means I could just post any videos I create directly on my website.
And that personal website is where we need to get back to. I wish all the fancy programmers at Meta and elsewhere would just put their energies into creating the tools that let people put content on their own site as easily as on Facebook. Add some semi-structured data that can be leveraged by displaying the results of pre-built custom web searches and you should be able to approximate the experience of Facebook.
That’s one of the use-cases I’ve had in mind. You have your site, you have a video. If you posted your video to your site though PeerTube (or really any implementation of ActivityPub), both your direct site viewers AND anyone searching PeerTube (et al) would see it.
If lots of people did that, you have a basis for a version of distributed YouTube. Small creators’ (or people just messing around) videos might load slower or only have lower bandwidth options (resolution), but larger, focused creators (CorridorCrew, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, etc) would have more options through viewer support and collaborations.
Yes, that fits my own mental model of the online world I’d like to see.
I don’t have experience with any of those, YouTube is still ad free for me luckily, but how plausible would a completely peer hosted video streaming service be? Like TOR based or something like that where it’s the collective of all the users hosting.
Realistically? Virtually impossible. Youtube handles petabytes of data daily, and just the storage capacity would burn the money of everyone but the big corporations. There simply isn’t a way to compete with a corporation that can afford to throw millions at a machine that doesn’t make profit enough to cover those massive costs.
You’re considering only the prospect of doing things the YouTube way, as a service owned and operated by a single entity. As my dad was known to say “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” Who knows whether that is literally true, but the metaphor has proven accurate every time someone finds a different, often better, way to do something.
You mean like https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances ?
It’s not just plausible, it already exists. See joinpeertube.org . There are more than 1000 instances already. Just need more content creators (some are already dual-posting, or migrated entirely).
There’s also LBRY, but it operates on some goofy-ass crypto scheme, so I assume it will fail.
Dope, I’ll check it out, although it might be slow growth right now, YouTube for a lot of people like me is hard to break. I’ve got years and years of saved videos, subscriptions, watch history, etc.
True, but you are here, instead of reddit. It’s possible.
That kind of goes more to my point though, Reddit got to the point where there was nothing to lose by leaving, YouTube is headed there, but not yet.
I 100% agree. Right now, people are just kind of mildly irritated. My irritation is more than mild, hence my leaving entirely.
I’m just speculating now, but it’s possible that the Google anti-trust might result in YouTube spinning off again. If they also see that coming, they might be trying to backstop it while they still have time and resources to try things (cutting off adblockers, increasing premium fees, they already changed how rev-sharing eligibility and payouts work, etc).
There’s a high chance that they’re going to make the wrong move and piss everyone off, or people will just stop putting up with 2 minutes of unskippable ads before, then again during, then after each video. Content will start getting pirated en masse, advertiserzers will drop (or pay less, or force even more ads to compensate, which is what already happened), and the cycle will continue and get worse until the service just collapses under it’s own weight.
Something will take it’s place. Probably multiple things. I just hope federated services are among them. Hell, people adopted Crypto ferociously, which was extremely expensive and completely useless. Even if federated video is expensive, at least it does something.