this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?
I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.
Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.
Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.
Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.
Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.
...i think pornhub's leaving money on the table not starting a SFW video platform...
Notpornhub
Users spend hours on YT, and 30 secs on PH. They'd have to scale their infrastructure up massively.
Look at this guy and his whole 30s
considering pornhubs history of legal troubles, I doubt they are much inclined.
If you tried to create a centralized one? Yeah, it would take a lot. Would a decentralized one be as expensive? I'm not sure.
I think the best goal would be to try to create a platform for creators that has a low barrier to entry - both in terms of cost and skill - that gives them the ability to easily and quickly set up a "channel" to "broadcast" from and earn some revenue somehow.
Why build one competitor to YouTube when we could build a billion of them?
Because thats the very reason why people hate current streaming services, and you're arguing to not only make it worse than that, but to make the end users eat the costs of storage and bandwidth.
You don't understand why people hate streaming fragmentation.
You can have a billion decentralized openyoutube all on the same page, just look how lemmy already does it.
Podcast also did it with RSS. Agglomeration isn't an issue on a decentralized open platform
If they shared the same protocol, or at least reasonably compatible versions of it, you could have one app that does all of them.
The protocol isn't the hard part. It's the monetizing that is. Creators aren't looking to provide content for free, especially if they are also now paying for hosting costs.
Ad spots (like Google does) work well because they can inject an up to date ad into an old video. In something like the fedeverse today a creators only option would be ads baked into the video, but they would only get paid for that up front which isn't ideal...
Sponsors pay much more than views. So does patrons.
The true issue is discoverability in my opinion.
Sponsors pay more upfront. If creators are only using sponsors than their whole back catalogue is basically valueless. If it costs a creator 2-10 cents a month to host a video (based off S3 pricing), but they only made 1000$ on it upfront when the video was made, overtime the back catalogue becomes a pretty significant financial burden if it's not being monetized
Also it's worth keeping in mind that many people are also using tools to autoskip sponsor spots, and the only leverage creators have for being paid by sponsors are viewership numbers.
Patreon is irrelevant, that's just like Nebula, floatplane etc, it's essentially a subscription based alternative to YouTube.
Discoverability is pointless if the people discovering you aren't going to financial contribute. It's the age old "why don't you work for me for free, the exposure I provide will make it worth your time", that hasn't been true before and likely isn't here. Creators aren't looking to work for free (at least not the ones creating the high quality content we're used to today)
Yet bittorrent does youtube fives times over with central governance. You have drunk too much cloud coolaid. My laptop could host my youtube channel without issue and I would still have enough juice to play counter strike and download the latest marvel slop movie.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you'll get depends on who you're getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they're downloading it from may not all have the entire file's worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there's no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there's no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
Exactly.
I'm feeling like this whole "distrubuted youtube!" argument is nothing but a variant of the blockchain fantasy. Seeing a lot of the same style of arguments and ignorance.
It’s a common trap for certain types of people to assume technology can fix problems that are inventive or socially driven.
Its also a common trap for idiots to grasp hold of a fraction of a fragment of an idea and think it gives them complete and total understanding, and then go around proselytizing their absolute incompetence as if its techno-gospel.
Which I think is why this distributed youtube bull follows the same general argument trend as the mythical and holy blockchain. That does nothing, but somehow can magically solve all problems.
We solved this problem BEFORE youtube was even a thing. Youtube only exists out of convenience for normies. Youtube can die tomorrow, we will still have unlimited video. In fact, think youtube slowed down innovation on this front. Torrent trackers are unchanged in their form from 2003. I wouldn't mind federated content, browser integration of torrent systems and locally running content recommendation system as well as social crowdsourced review systems (aka the like button and comments)
To be fair, a LOT of people swear by Popcorn Time, which is exactly that. I was surprised it worked as well as it does, too.
If the file is that poorly seeded, and therefore extremely sparsely watched, then the laptop with a broken screen in my closet can serve it to anyone who wants it.
The only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand / broad appeal media and in that case, what you describe WON'T happen.
For low demand media, https off my mom's coffemaker will do just fine.
That means anyone posting 100-200 video to youtube today, can easily handle all these situation with less expense than the price of whatever camera they filmed the content with to begin with.
Youtube only exists, because us, old internet fucks, got lazy and relied on google for mail and video.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It's fundamentally unreliable.
Scalability isn't just about distribution. It's about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That's the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have...nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models. Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it. The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames. Well, the good parts of it, that's easy but can we save the garbage too, I'm not sure. Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it's entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side. Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space. Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.
I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn't deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.
The main limitation is the 1 gigabit network. It can push out 260 3megabit streams or 50 15megabit streams at the most.
That's already an enormous amount of concurrent viewers that covers 99% of content on youtube.
To achieve this, you can't be wasting processing power anywhere, a straight copy to network from pre encoded files, no live transcoding.
No scripting, no encryption either. If you really need that, which you almost certainly don't, then install a recerse proxy on your openwrt router.
Now, if you want to scale, which almost no video really needs, then you'll send the client a script. The client is a source of inifinite scaling, compute and bandwidth.
Each client just needs to rebroadcast two streams of the file.
As excess clients connect, you tell them to get the stream from the stun/turn server. This punches through both sides of the nat. And puts two clients in communication. First client sends its copies of the received stream chunks, with preference from the beginning of the file. One client can get the stream from multiple other client and once it has a few stream chunks in the cache it can serve them to new clients.
It doesn't take many doublings before you have more bandwidth than the whole internet. All the logic for organisation, hash checking, stream block ordering etc etc is a small text file from the server, signed by the server's certificate. It runs entirely inside the client's browser.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It's not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.
Your laptop would become suicidal the second it had to start serving streaming, 4k video to dozens of people, much less hundreds or thousands.
You must not want a youtube competitor then, if your goal is to just okay-ly stream to just a couple dozen or so people.
You are correct. Nearly all youtube channels can be fully served off a single laptop. 260 concurrent streams at 1080p 3mbps is achievable over gigabit ethernet. Very few channels exceed this for any appreciable amount of time. And in those cases we can leverage a very small amount of the client's ressources to further propagate the stream. This can be done with repurposed bittorrent dht. Now all we need is federated RSS and a locally running content curation algorithm and a social review system (like buttons and reputation history)
My laptop can copy files at 15 mbps, very very easily. Hundreds ? Again piss easy, that's what bittorrents are for, even easier when the swarms takes care of all the traffic. The more people are 10 or so and the faster it will copy itself. Do you cloud people still know how to copy files or was that arcane knowledge lost to the sands of 1995 ?
I hate the cloud you perfidious incompetent. The only thing more stupid than the "cloud" is your belief that you can serve hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous streams,possibly 1080, most likely 4k, from your 15mbps laptop.