Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.
How about a decentralized, federated service instead of hoping a major corporation tries to “save” us?
I don’t think even a decentralized service could hold a mass equal to youtube. That would require that either the owners of all instances pay from their own pockets with mostly no income to support it, or that every user paid up, which is not going to happen, at least not in a service like youtube.
Some of us are data holders and have Gigabit internet with options to go even higher. Don’t count out the little guys ability to share massive amounts of data… been doing it since zip drives and CDs
That doesn’t address the issue of storage and compute power for streaming to the absurd amount of users.
There’s been attempts before and it all comes down to file transfer time and storage (because at the time the servers weren’t transcoding for streaming the file. Secondary issue of buy in, like what we see with niche communities staying on reddit instead of moving to the fediverse.
There already exist a number of projects out there like peertube. Take a look at how even the most popular instances are doing. It’s not well.
The closest thing was around a decade ago, the popcorntime or popcornflix or whatever it was called app/program that was just a nice front end for torrenting videos and watching them before they finished downloading. Each individual user was responsible for their own storage, network connection speed, and compute power to render the video for themselves. Each end user was also contributing back through helping others to download the file via standard torrenting p2p stuff.
So now you need a front end to host the magnet links to the files, and a robust set of seed servers so no video is ever truly lost. That still doesn’t cover a significant portion of youtube’s functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.
Unlike reddit, youtube is technologically complicated and impressive. Hell, read up on some of the stuff Netflix has had to do to achieve reasonable streaming quality and speed on an insanely smaller curated library.
A decentralized federated solution is possible, but there’s a shit ton more that would have to go into this than just appealing to the concept.
That still doesn’t cover a significant portion of youtube’s functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.
Seems to me that anything beyond the actual hosting and serving of the video file is unnecessary to include by default in a federated video streaming solution. To drill down a bit, recommendations don’t need to be handled by an algorithm, the content creator can make their own list of videos or playlist - do we really want another reco algo passively controlling what we feed our minds? Comments could be something as simple as a mastodon or lemmy thread with the video as the OP. Content editing after the fact doesn’t seem like its that big a deal aside from computational and bandwidth overhead which would seem small compared to the task of serving multiple thousands of viewers at once.
It’s still just as expensive, you’re just adding administrative overhead.
You’d also spread the cost to more people, true, but who would operate a server for free (based on donations, but if it’s federated why should I pay for that one server?). Also, do you trust all those people to keep operating the storage for years to come? Or are you done with losing access to videos, because someone lost interest in running their instance?
Storage and bandwidth costs for video on demand are so incredibly high, I don’t think we’ll get a federated alternative to YouTube any time soon.
Honestly this feels like the only possible way to win against Youtube. Goal could be to just create standardized decentralized platform where number of different companies/organizations can host and serve their own content while still being searchable and accessible from single client application.
Major problem with Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube is searching and browsing content from multiple instances is still difficult.
One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it’s funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don’t think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.
So the answer is don’t. Let your clients help you. Like peer tube. If a video gets incredibly popular, then it will have lots of watchers at the same time. If it has lots of watchers at the same time, that means anybody who starts to watch it after those watchers have started will be downloading the video from the watchers and not from the server.
I think Floatplane has more future but I don’t use either of them so I can judge.
Lifetime licenses are weird.
Interesting, I thought Floatplane only hosted LTT content. Nebula has a LOT of creators spanning a very wide gamut of highly content. It has been gaining momentum steadily for several years now.
That said, I’d be happy to see them both succeed. We need more competition, having all internet video (minus NSFW and some short-form) hosted on one platform seems neither sustainable nor ideal.
The problem with any competitor is providing enough value to content producers to get them to make the move.
Eh, kinda. Tbh youtube didn’t use to be that way, it was just a place to upload your videos and search for other videos. Over time they grew it into a creator focused site much to the detriment of the quality of content imo. Like sure, creators are producing 4k videos with great lighting and yada yada yada, but they have to create so much content constantly that the videos favored by youtube’s algorithm are fairly soulless, low effort mass produced crap that looks shinier. Classic youtube was some dude with a heavy accent recording on a nokia potato a 25 second video that immediately showed you how to do exactly what you entered into the search bar.
It was like that in an age that no longer exists, and can no longer exist. Things were generally decentralised as everyone was doing and hosting their own shit. And people were fine and accustomed to finding weird holes with a collection of strange content. The average user is now focused on convenience rather than exploring, especially as web content has come to supplant other forms of entertainment.
Yeah everyone talking about how many additional TB of data you need to host every hour - if content had to justify it’s existence on it’s own merits a lot less of it would exist and it’s quality would be dramatically superior.
Youtube had a space devoid of competition. The next guy doesn’t. If the next guy wants to compete, they have to have all the features of Youtube or people will complain. Many of Youtube’s current features cost money and weren’t present when Youtube started.
The space is also more regulated now that Youtube exists, meaning the new guy has to follow regulations which normally costs money. When Youtube started, those regulations didn’t exist, because Youtube didn’t exist.
Youtube got big by building a city in an open field surrounded by nothing but open fields. The next guy has to build a city directly next to Youtube, follow all the same laws as Youtube, and ask you not to drive into Youtube.
Two reasons:
- Because no one else occupied the same space in a meaningful way.
- Low interest rates meant they were able to get massive investments without the burden of profitability.
Now you’d need to distinguish yourself from YouTube in a meaningful way as well as provide a sustainable revenue model, such as advertising, in order to gain access to a similar amount of venture capital.
