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Chinese video platform Bilibili is going global to challenge Youtube (www.engadget.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The China-centric video sharing platform is expanding with a new international app and an English version of its website -- with no identity verification (for now at least)

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[–] 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It's a really hard problem to solve though. Video hosting is a huge data hog I don't think small independent instances would be able to keep up with the storage requirements. Especially at the moment considering storages so expensive.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    honestly i think it'd be nice to have a full p2p video directory instead. something like peertube but without instances, resembling a torrent tracker like nyaa, aimed generally for educational stuff, entertainment, music, etc. basically youtube but as a torrent tracker, to reduce the storage requirement. you'd be able to seed your favorite media and the fact that people would not want to waste their storage on seeding worthless stuff and the technical hurdle of p2p would keep the mindless slop out.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I like the idea. My only gripe is it's complexity for the average user. If there was a way to make it super simple. Torrent clients and trackers are way to complecated the average user.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    it would be cool if i (or any user) could just contribute a part of their storage space / network connection to the video platform. something like "i store this video (that i just watched) for a month sothat others can see it too".

    unfortunately, as i understand it, there's both technical and legal hurdles.

    • technical hurdle: this doesn't work for mobile, where network traffic is often limited. e.g. if i pay $10 for 50 GB upload/download capacity per month, then i don't want 49 GB of those to be sucked up by other people's video watching behavior.
    • legal hurdle: what if some of the content is accidentally illegal? then i would be distributing illegal material, which can quickly become a problem for myself ... (seeing how it is illegal in many countries to distribute copyrighted material, but not to watch it oneself).
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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    It wouldn't be worth it anyway. Assuming we're trying to compete with YouTube you'd want fairly long fairly high quality videos, 25 minute video at 4k (reasonable length and resolution for 2026) would take between 12 and 13 gigabytes of storage, assuming some videos are slightly shorter or slightly low quality maybe 1080p you could personally contribute about four to five videos on your storage plan. At which point you wonder whether or not it's even worth the effort.

    Even one terabyte storage drive wouldn't store enough videos to really make a competitive product.

    The only reason that YouTube can make it work is because they get their storage in bulk and therefore get massive discounts.

    This means that even if Google was broken up I can't see YouTube being a viable standalone product.

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