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.
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.
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.
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.
