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We've come a long way baby (i.imgur.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 42 points 2 years ago* (11 children)

I think the hosting is the real problem. For something like Lemmy where it's just text it's not too expensive, but when you need to store and stream videos for free I have to imagine most people wouldn't be able to afford that without charging for it and the moment you start charging you can't compete with YouTube anymore

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    i think the solution could be a FOSS torrenting site where everyone hosts their own videos (or maybe a stream only site?). people are already willing to fork over for netflix so maybe if the content quality was extremely high theyd shift (e.g. nebula)

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Yep, this is already a solved problem via torrents. All that's needed is a site (like lemmy or something else) to host the links, and help with content discovery.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    dessalines can you make a poetry community on lemmy.ml

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Nebula could be a good case study in how well this would work. The content on there is of exceptional quality. To be honest, though, that's not always what I'm looking for. Sometimes I just want a bunch of garbage rather than a little high quality content. The big social media platforms put a bunch of it in one place. I know it's not really a good thing, but sometimes I just need background noise while I do other shit and random YouTube videos really does it for me.

    I can't seem to find any data on how much of Nebula's revenue is actually due to the Curiosity stream tie-in, but I know even I was wary of the $5/mo subscription without the CuriosityStream sub to sweeten the deal. So maybe even the world's largest creator-owned streaming platform needed that investment.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    We need to crowdfund a starting base, and after that the site wouid have to charge something just be reasonable to not like asshole youtube.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Majority of people will always choose free, convenient and what they're used to

    If it's not free it stands very little chance against something that is all 3

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I wonder...

    Suppose you had a company that, at it's core, was closer a vps provider than anything else. People who want to host videos on the service pay a fee. The hosts can solicit money via the usual means (patreon, personally working with advertisers, merch, whatever), but part of the service agreement is that the hosting service itself cannot place their own ads. You also have some backup system in place where after x amount of time, videos get archived to some outside service (Internet Archive, some peer-to-peer mechanism - no idea what the options are). This is to at least try to mitigate storage limitations and other problems with retaining a large back catalogue.

    All of this is said from a position of deep ignorance - but could something like this work? My stumbling block is anyone running a company is eventually going to need/want an additional revenue stream and ads are an obvious first stop. For this to exist it would pretty much take an activist owner not budging and ruling with an iron fist. That, and would such a service be able to offer hobbyist hosts a fair price, given this is where a lot of people start?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    There's many services out there like that that will charge you for basically the hardware and bandwidth (i.e. a VPS) but will give you an easy interface to host applications - even federated ones. The problem really is how do you compete with free? It's "free" to watch and free to upload on YouTube. And all your favourite creators are probably already there because of the network effect YouTube has built over the years. And it's a great place to discover new ones, too, even ones that have been around longer than you've been alive (for some folks, anyway).

    From a technical perspective, though, this is pretty feasible. With huge upfront costs. If you rent hardware from existing providers like AWS/DigitalOcean/etc. you're gonna pay out the ass for it. It doesn't seem expensive to people who just need a little hardware but we're talking about video here. You have to store multiple versions of a single video - that's a ton of hard drive space. You have to encode what is uploaded by the users into a workable format - that's a ton of compute. So if you were gonna provide it to hobbyists at a reasonable price you'd want to open your own data center (yes people still do that) which will give you some, relatively speaking, very very cheap storage, compute, bandwidth. The only issue is it costs a ton upfront and you need someone to maintain it if you don't know how.

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