[HN Gopher] Video tutorials now on PeerTube
___________________________________________________________________
Video tutorials now on PeerTube
Author : phkahler
Score : 163 points
Date : 2021-07-08 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (solvespace.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (solvespace.com)
| RL_Quine wrote:
| It's pretty hard to imagine what people think they gain by
| "switching" to PeerTube. Beyond idealism, there's not a whole lot
| going for the platform technically; it isn't peer to peer
| meaningfully. It would be better to just claim you are paying to
| self host your videos, which is what the author is doing.
| jcims wrote:
| Is there a downside to going to peertube versus self-hosting?
| Even if you just use it as a CMS for your videos, it seems like
| it's all upside to me. Plus it adds a drop to the bucket of
| network effect for the platform, which appears to be the only
| viable alternative to YouTube in which the publisher retains
| the lion's share of authority.
| marci wrote:
| Technically, if I understand correctly, one of the thing going
| for peertube is that it allows you to survive [insert any
| popular forum]'s hug of death. Some website don't even handle a
| surge of connections when it's just text. With peertube, most
| of the time, you're serving directly from your website, but in
| case of virality, the video will be distributed across most of
| the simultaneous viewers.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| If the website is "hugged", nobody can reach the page with
| the javascript to make WebRTC connections. People tend to
| close the window after they're done watching anyway, which
| sort of negates the whole concept.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| I think Peertube is "marketed" in the wrong way, perhaps
| inescapably. Making a simple video-hosting platform is going to
| invite comparisons to Youtube, but Frama is very clear they
| don't see themselves that way. Peertube is NOT an alternative
| to Youtube, and it can't be with the tiny team working on it.
|
| However, it does have one edge-case use that's come up a few
| times. If you have a few bucks, moderate technical knowledge,
| and just need a way to put 20 or 30 videos online in a form
| that's easy to link to and navigate for the non-technical,
| Peertube can be a handy tool. In the past you might say "Why
| not Youtube?", but Youtube has become increasingly obnoxious to
| use for simple "throwaway" cases. What's the alternative?
| Tossing the files up on a shady site like Mega? Running an FTP
| server or hosting a torrent? Youtube used to be a no-brainer
| for something like this, but there are so many techno-
| bureaucratic gotchas now that an alternative just might be
| worth it. There's zero discoverability, no ad revenue, and you
| have to deal with hosting and security, but at least Peertube
| is a ready-made package that mostly "just works."
| goatmeal wrote:
| discoverability isn't zero. you need a foothold on other
| parts of the fediverse so that people know who you are and
| once you have that people will subscribe and share.
| godshatter wrote:
| If people want sovereignty, they can run their own server, but
| no one would find it. Peertube is a good middle ground,
| especially since you can run your own instance if you really
| want more control.
| rvz wrote:
| Good.
|
| YouTube cannot be fixed and they will never change, and it is no
| more about 'the creators' anymore, It's for the big influencers,
| advertisers and now for the already established cable news
| networks. It's for the best to start leaving the platform since
| it is completely skewed for them.
|
| At least there are some sane alternative platforms that exist
| which make the switch possible to some.
| duxup wrote:
| I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that
| we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more
| control?
|
| In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground
| rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service
| where they were the product...
|
| The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free
| as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that
| we didn't pay for changes, or in some other cases just tries to
| turn a profit / be sustainable.
| nathanyz wrote:
| This is a super important point. We as users control how we are
| treated on the Internet. We can choose to pay for content, or
| we can choose to exchange our time, data, buying habits,
| psychographics, etc, etc, etc in return for "free" services.
|
| The choice is ours...Pay or barter? Barter our time watching
| ads, or pay money that we earned elsewhere.
|
| Disclaimer: Founder of YouTube alternative where site owners
| who are tired of exchanging their traffic, and user data for
| free video hosting can pay affordable pricing just like they do
| for their web host, database host, and other services.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Isn't that what commercial streaming services like
| CuriousityStream and Skillshare are trying to provide?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that
| we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more
| control?
|
| You can already do this at Vimeo. I guess we should look at how
| well they are doing with that. (That's not leading; I don't
| know.)
| wyldfire wrote:
| > I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that
| we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more
| control?
|
| The non-free service will always be a smaller player IMO. But
| if there were a big enough bundle, people might see the value.
| A not-too-many-USD-per-year Youtube+LinkedIn+Facebook+Twitter
| web suite would be feasible IMO. Just imagine if it were seen
| as a public good and countries could fund it with a
| comparatively small per capita investment.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I would pay a sub for YouTube due to the value provided if
| they, in turn, paid me for the data they have stolen from me.
| Of course, if I get to name my price in this "free market,"
| they would be paying me far more than they could reasonably
| charge for YT. And really, why would I want to give money to an
| abusive company?
|
| I keep hearing this lament that everyone just wants stuff for
| free. I think it is a distraction from the current wild west
| where these surveillance companies are the ones getting high
| value data for petty baubles.
| duxup wrote:
| > these surveillance companies are the ones getting high
| value data for petty baubles
|
| Because we give it to them.
|
| The end user's choices matter here.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| "give" only in the technical sense.
|
| "did not turn off third party cookies" should not equate
| "authorized this company to log about every site I visit"
|
| (of course, if you are on youtube itself, that is another
| matter -- but you are replying to, I think, a more general
| comment about the two sides and the value they
| obtain/extract from each other)
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| But should the audience pay or the creators? I can pay a
| subscription to watch videos but the creators may choose
| another video hosting service. So this only works if it's a
| monopoly, or if the services agrees to create a federation.
| Looks like PeerTube is better suited for this than Youtube
| but who should I pay and how do hosting platforms pay each
| creator wherever they host their content?
| numpad0 wrote:
| HTTP 402 being left unimplemented only seemed natural to me
| just a decade ago; today looks an incredibly stupid decision.
| How things change......
| daptaq wrote:
| 402 is not the issue, the issue is having a payment system
| that wouldn't just add an implicit dependency on some payment
| service.
| acomjean wrote:
| I didn't know what the HTTP 402 status code was:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
|
| Its payment required.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that
| we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more
| control?
|
| You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/premium
| draw_down wrote:
| More control for whom? A content creator's struggles with
| YouTube are only relevant to me to the extent that I am able to
| watch their videos. The monetization, rights, etc are between
| them. Not my monkeys, not my circus.
| abacadaba wrote:
| the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure,
| private, and widely accepted micropayments.
|
| there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't
| involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit
| card info.
| criddell wrote:
| How would it work with not creating an account?
|
| Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay
| for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to
| something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year
| later and want access again?
|
| A good password manager can make creating an account almost
| effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
| ipsi wrote:
| Maybe browsers should looking at adding a "create account"
| API or something? Similar to "Login with Apple ID", but
| instead password managers could hook into it and create an
| account semi-automatically. This could also allow
| automation of "user+sitename@domain.com"-style rules.
|
| I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_
| friction, but there is some and I could see myself
| appreciating this.
| fouric wrote:
| > How would it work with not creating an account?
|
| Notice that they said "yet _another_ account " - I'm pretty
| sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a
| single account for the micropayments service, but instead
| creating a separate account for each individual service
| that they could instead use micropayments for.
|
| > A good password manager can make creating an account
| almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
|
| That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving
| them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that
| part of the problem is the proliferation of private data
| among a very large number of individual
| sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do
| anything at all to help secure your private information
| from these services that you would be signing up for.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't know about Google Pay, but I believe Apple Pay
| uses the payment tokenization scheme from EMVCo. Sites
| don't get your primary account number (PAN), they get a
| generated number that is linked to that number.
|
| SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
| fouric wrote:
| Right - that's an argument to use a centralized payment
| service (which Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, etc.
| (probably) fulfill). I (might have mis-)read that part of
| your post as being about micro-payment systems not being
| necessary.
|
| I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are
| "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction
| fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions
| are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you
| set up 1-click payments?
| abacadaba wrote:
| Now that you mention it though, there was some service i
| saw ads for that generates a new cc for each use. i
| forget the name maybe some here works there :)
|
| There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big
| sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see
| know which creators i support.
| criddell wrote:
| Apple Pay does this. Merchants get a token which looks
| like a credit card number but isn't. If you are using an
| Apple Credit Card, then the processor (Goldman Sachs) is
| not allowed to use your purchase data in that way.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But
| if I pay for access to something today, how do you know
| it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
|
| Yet another reason why identity verification by default
| would make the net better. No spam, easy payments,
| elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, now you're talking about essentially
| eliminating anonymity on the web which not everyone would
| want.
| briefcomment wrote:
| I wonder if Bitcoin Cash or something similar can fit that
| void. It's already possible to send cents for reasonable
| fees.
| abacadaba wrote:
| LBRY is what had me thinking a lot about this
| duxup wrote:
| As an end user, and even imagining receiving payments, I'd
| be annoyed with a micropayment service that has some sort
| of conversion of what I'm paying into something else and
| then ... who knows how it goes from there...
| ghaff wrote:
| Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem
| of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few
| cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media.
| I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology
| or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have
| been solved given how many media payment issues could in
| principle be solved by micropayments.
| fouric wrote:
| I don't buy this argument, for a couple of reasons.
|
| First, for large classes of media, the energy required to
| consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of
| even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy
| required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to
| watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the
| energy spent watching the video itself, and probably
| comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads
| beforehand.
|
| Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is
| true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument
| that the value of those media is very low anyway.
|
| Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can
| be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g.
| the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video
| and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch
| or not), or through other technical solutions like setting
| a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that
| you can get creative with this.
|
| Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been
| solved" - there are many, many problems that _could_ be
| solved through technically superior solutions that aren 't,
| because of external forces (monopolies on a market,
| manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-
| incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-
| wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally
| attached to, etc).
|
| I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't
| _want_ to pay for content. People want it to be free. And,
| currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal
| experiences) either don 't know how much of their data is
| being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost
| services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for
| a micropayment solution.
|
| EDIT: As an _entirely separate point_ from what I wrote
| above, I think that the mental transaction costs would
| actually be _useful_ (even if people hate them), because
| they 'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the
| overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the
| length of the content), and incentivize long-form,
| thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial
| effects.
| ghaff wrote:
| >People want it to be free.
|
| I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. Of course, people
| want things to be free as the default condition. Which is
| what sets up the mental transaction cost when something
| _isn 't_ free. And we see this in all sorts of settings.
| It's quite well established that there's a bigger gulf
| between free and really cheap than there is between
| really cheap and just cheap.
| fouric wrote:
| You're right, on further inspection, we may not be
| disagreeing.
|
| To clarify: I'm arguing against the idea of people not
| liking the _mental transaction costs_ being the primary
| reason why microtransactions haven 't been adopted (which
| is the point that I thought that you were making). I
| agree that _the monetary costs themselves_ are the
| primary reason.
| andai wrote:
| Here is Clay Shirky's article on Micropayments:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirk
| y...
| duxup wrote:
| I wonder about this often.
|
| I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I
| could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all...
| but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional
| cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still
| pay the creators for their work .
| Filligree wrote:
| There once was such a system --Google Contributor. It was
| supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once
| there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by,
| using the price of ads to bootstrap.
|
| It didn't work, obviously, but mostly because people just
| don't want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit
| dollars per month, or less.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I like Blendle for the occasional paywalled news article I
| really want to read. But, yeah, mostly I just bounce if
| something's not free and, I think people need to be honest
| with themselves about the consequences of removing ads from
| the internet: it'll be significantly harder for new sites
| to both be profitable and attract an audience and they'll
| have to choose between giving away unmonetized content to
| attract people and putting content behind some sort of
| paywall so that they can cover their operational costs.
|
| We're already starting to see this model with Substack and
| Medium, and I'm not sure if it's a better model, or just a
| different one.
| iaml wrote:
| >It didn't work, obviously, but mostly because people just
| don't want to pay.
|
| Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't
| know it existed.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Nobody has managed micropayments that are actually micro.
| Even F2P games rarely allow you to spend less than about $1
| at a time - it's all about chasing whales who'll spend
| $99.99 repeatedly...
|
| In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly
| more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than
| they'd earn from an average user watching the ads.
|
| The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads'
| button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to
| watch a specific video without ads.
| ghaff wrote:
| For charging just a few cents to work, it would have to
| be normed across a wide range of media to the degree that
| a meter just transparently clicked against a payment
| balance in essentially the same manner as turning on a
| faucet or a light switch. And that's a really high bar in
| an online world where people are used to either free or a
| relative handful of all-you-can-eat subscription services
| that cost enough that people sign up for them fairly
| deliberately.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > that's a really high bar in an online world
|
| For all the BS projects google has spent money on, then
| just killed off, a micropayment system should be easy.
|
| > all-you-can-eat subscription services
|
| Then give an alternative AYCE option too. Just implement
| micropayment caps. e.g. When total monthly micropayments
| are => $10, cap it at _that_ amount until some other
| thresh-hold. Allow pre-payments. easy.
| jrd259 wrote:
| Ted Nelson was very explicit on this point in his visionary
| book "Dream Machines".
| xscott wrote:
| I was even willing to create accounts and provide my credit
| card info for sites with good value, but not being able to
| cancel online (and being forced to wait on hold for 40
| minutes to cancel over the phone) has me unwilling to
| subscribe to almost anything any more.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Probably never. I'd venture that the overwhelming majority of
| users on the internet do not even understand the concept of the
| ad model, much less the downsides.
|
| To them the internet and everything on it is free (and what
| isn't free is just greed by the owner) and ads are these
| annoying thing that crop up everywhere.
| duxup wrote:
| I fear you may be correct. Or maybe even that people just
| don't care about privacy enough to do a thing about it :(
| analognoise wrote:
| Sadly I think it's both: everything is free right, and
| what's the big deal with this privacy stuff anyway?
| ssivark wrote:
| Torrents seem like the ideal solution for something like this?
| The infrastructure cost of hosting is shared by all those who
| find the content valuable. It also has a natural cache-like
| behavior where popular content will be highly seeded, while
| unpopular content drops out.
|
| Interestingly, Peertube seems to be backed by exactly such
| infrastructure.
| reedjosh wrote:
| Centralized ad based services are never in your interest. What
| you spend your time on matters, so I try to be critical of my
| browsing habits.
|
| Some sites/services I currently use:
|
| neeva.com
|
| Paid search that I'm liking atm. Feels like I can find stuff
| again and it's 4 months free.
|
| For video hosting and content I like
|
| Odysee.com
|
| as an ad free decentralized Youtube, but the network effect
| hasn't quite taken hold yet.
|
| Social I like
|
| peakd.com
|
| as a decentralized blogging and social platform.
| clord wrote:
| What are the per-viewer costs these days to host video files on a
| plain web server? Perhaps with a CDN?
| eropple wrote:
| Video is the sort of thing that benefits significantly from
| economies of scale. Encoding and bandwidth costs are your two
| biggest factors. Encoding has to be done once -- well, once per
| rendition you ship, more on that in a second -- but bandwidth
| costs are, modulo volume discounts, _very linear_ , and thus a
| direct per-viewer-minute line item. Those bandwidth costs
| typically depend on your desired quality of video (bitrate) and
| capacity of service. CDNs and traditional cloud services tend
| to have expensive outbound bandwidth. VPSes etc. don't, but
| it's not fast enough to serve many users, and what happens when
| you hit transfer limits is Not Great.
|
| It is pretty rare in 2021 to serve video just as "video files".
| HLS and DASH allow for adaptive quality streaming for
| bandwidth- or performance-constrained devices -- which can also
| help keep costs down, if you're shipping lower bitrate 480p
| renditions to some clients rather than full-boat 1080p -- and
| make resumption of partially played media easier. (Because you
| can append segments to an HLS or DASH manifest, you can also
| use this technology more easily for live-streamed content.)
|
| This stuff is complicated. You can build out the pipelines to
| do this stuff yourself with either cloud services or a lot of
| duct tape -- I've done it before -- but it's A Lot Of Work to
| get right and economies of scale are a real thing. There exist
| services like Mux Video (YC W16, https://mux.com -- this is a
| shameless plug; I work on the devex team) package this and
| present straightforwardly consumable APIs for folks who just
| want to ship decent video at a reasonable price.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very
| linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item
|
| We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers
| send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This
| would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the
| main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams,
| but that can be fairly low bandwidth.
| eropple wrote:
| It's possible. I have my doubts, for a few reasons; as with
| most technical challenges, it's a deeper problem than most
| people realize.
|
| 1) Orchestration of this is not trivial, and creates new
| points of centralization. Who runs your moral equivalent of
| a tracker/DHT? How do _they_ keep the lights on for your
| relatively niche video? There are social differences
| between the infrastructural audiences of BitTorrent and a
| hypothetical general-purpose video tracker. If the idea is
| that everyone runs their own, you 're getting into latency-
| sensitive problems of coordination (and given the push
| towards static sites, make me ask "do we expect people to
| have the capacity to do this?") that strike me as tricky
| given the requirements of video streaming.
|
| 2) This assumes that clients are both willing and able to
| do peer-to-peer transfers. I wouldn't bet on it.
|
| 3) This assumes that clients keep old chunks around for the
| purpose of peer-to-peer transfers (and don't evict things
| when under memory/storage pressure) _and_ adequately update
| the tracker with what it has available at all times. I
| wouldn 't bet on that being a reasonable assumption.
|
| 4) This assumes clients are reliable and have reliable
| upload. If you don't get a chunk from that peer client fast
| enough or that client disappears before you can handshake
| with another one and get that chunk, you have a video drop.
| Video drops are a game-over condition in 2021. Which
| probably seems unfair to say, but something like this has
| to present a better solution for _clients_ , not for
| _content providers_ , and this strikes me as really not
| viable for clients. Otherwise, people leave.
|
| Video is really, really hard. It wasn't until I built a
| pipeline myself (not a fancy one, either) that I realized
| how nasty it was. Slinging huge amounts of data around with
| stiff latency requirements seems to lend itself to more
| vertical scaling than this approach suggests.
| [deleted]
| wussboy wrote:
| Probably approaching zero. But how are people going to find
| you. That's the problem YouTube solves.
| benrbray wrote:
| We've got good old-fashioned RSS and blogrolls!
| aequitas wrote:
| That's not how people find you, that how people keep up to
| date once they have found you.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's going to totally depend on how popular you are. For videos
| with a relative handful of viewers, host it wherever. If you're
| a popular site, costs could be hundreds, maybe thousands per
| month. But you'd have to make some assumptions and do the math.
|
| And, as peer says, discoverability unless you already have an
| audience.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I'd argue the risk aspect is what prevents more people from
| self-hosting than the actual cost. At least it is for me: The
| idea of waking up to a bill of a few thousand dollars is
| chilling. And then there is also this conflict of objectives:
| With an ad-supported platform more popularity means more
| money, with self-hosting more popularity is less money. Can't
| have your cake and eat it too.
| api wrote:
| Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe
| bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may
| get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a
| stupid high bill. You can also get 2-4X the compute and RAM
| for pennies (comparatively).
|
| If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just
| using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is
| absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute.
| None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are
| leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs,
| or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous
| sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of
| resources.
|
| VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge
| for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at
| least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud
| vendors.
| ghaff wrote:
| S3 can make sense for lightweight hosting of media files.
| I pay less than I would for a VPS. That said, if I were
| starting from scratch, I'd probably use Backblaze B2
| because I believe they let you set hard quotas.
|
| But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd
| choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather
| than a big bill.
| api wrote:
| I think you can set quotas on S3 somehow too.
| ghaff wrote:
| You can set alerts but not hard quotas. This is a
| perpetual topic of debate around pretty much all the big
| cloud providers. They're really set up for companies that
| presumably don't want to "burn everything down" if they
| get a usage spike or screw something up. But it makes
| them at least something of a risk for an individual who
| absolutely doesn't want to wake up to a $3K bill under
| any circumstances.
| eropple wrote:
| _> Self-host at places like OVH that bill by pipe
| bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site
| may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won 't get
| a stupid high bill._
|
| If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when
| your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're
| OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't
| seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good
| advice.
|
| The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to
| extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business
| (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money)
| realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face
| when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost
| controls against quality of service is _kinda pretty
| hard_ for video because engagement is tied in pretty
| tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the
| video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set
| of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have
| more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to
| geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix
| this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of
| presence at multiple data centers, but there are
| economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN
| overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all
| video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is
| why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your
| venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to
| sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during
| the 99.9% period for your users who aren 't local to your
| point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules
| here.
| michaelt wrote:
| This guy's videos are deleted, but a different SolveSpace guide
| [1] is a 78MB download, and the most-viewed solvespace content
| on youtube has 10,000 views for a total of 780 gigabytes.
|
| Some of the most expensive cloud bandwidth is AWS egress, which
| costs $0.09 per gigabyte for the most expensive band [2]. So
| we're looking at $70 per video. Plus of course the price of
| your time to get everything set up and working right.
|
| Of course, you could undoubtedly get lower prices - either with
| an 'unlimited traffic' VPS if you're a small user, or by
| getting into a cheaper CDN pricing tier if you're a large user.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oROPkh6YosE [2]
| https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc2=type_a
| specialist wrote:
| Noob question:
|
| Does youtube show fewer ads on embedded videos?
|
| (Or maybe uBlock just works better against embedded videos.)
|
| If so, then maybe host a page of embedded videos.
|
| Further, for more than a handful of videos (embedded), I'd want
| some kind of carousel, so you don't crush the client's browser
| with dozens of videos pre-loading.
|
| (Hot damn I hate youtube.)
| jaworek wrote:
| odysee.com is also another good decentralised alternative. YT
| creators can easily sign up and setup automatic sync of all of
| their videos. This is a great way to have a backup in case Google
| decides to ban them or do some wonky policy changes.
| throwawayswede wrote:
| I had those solvespace tutorials bookmarked and was wondering why
| they went private a few days ago. I'm glad they're back and even
| more happy they're no longer on YouTube.
| deadalus wrote:
| Youtube Alternatives :
|
| Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii
|
| Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
| Covzire wrote:
| I'm pleasantly surprised how good Odysee's UX is, for the
| viewer anyway.
| [deleted]
| Jyaif wrote:
| In my experience Vimeo is great, while Dailymotion is absolute
| garbage: the streaming itself stutters at low quality and the
| amount of unskippable super long ads is _insane_.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| Peertube is Federated not Decentralized (via ActivityPub)
| underseacables wrote:
| What is the primary cost issue preventing greater competition and
| hosted videos? Is it band with, storage space, or just
| infrastructure? It seems this arena is very crowded with
| producers yet everyone is beholden to YouTube. Why?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Copyright compliance, lawsuit threats, illegal activity, legal
| investigations, similar such aspects have been a bane of
| decentralised service provision since the 1990s, if not before.
|
| One underappreciated role of a large, well-financed and well-
| capitalised publisher is in providing legal defence to both
| itself and its creators.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Absolutely loving how people are starting to abandon ship for
| self hosted platforms.
|
| If I had to compare this to a historical event, it would be like
| the Puritans leaving England for America to escape the oppressive
| bureaucracy that controlled their lives.
|
| There's radical freedom in decentralized social media. The
| question is whether or not it will take off as a viable
| alternative to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube -- or whether it will
| become the next Parler-esque shipwreck.
| muglug wrote:
| People have been abandoning walled gardens for many decades,
| but still walled gardens persist. Most either value the walls,
| or are indifferent to them.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Well, to be quite fair, places like England persisted, too.
| Popegaf wrote:
| Once PeerTube adds a way for plugin developers to monetize videos
| without ads directly on peertube, it might become much more
| interesting to people trying to build a career making content.
| Right now, the only option is to link to other pages (mostly
| paypal and patreon) and hope to get supporters that way.
|
| It's OK to keep it the way it is now, but there's friction in
| order to support content creators: you need at least one other
| account on another website in order to support at least one
| creator. I also doubt most people will support more than a few
| creators through those means.
|
| A "donate as you watch" plugin or something would be very useful.
| Transfer funds at some frequency to your peertube/activitypub
| account, and define rules (or keep some reasonable default) of
| how that is distributed.
|
| Examples:
|
| - 100% of your funds go to your favorite creator - 90% to
| favorite creator, 10% to the next top 2 depending on accumulated
| watch time in a month - Funds are distributed proportionally to
| watch time in a month
|
| Given that this is opensource and plugins are possible, there's a
| lot of room for innovation.
| dilap wrote:
| Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of
| forced ads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI)
|
| YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's
| unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary
| goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience
| over time seems inevitable.
|
| How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the
| innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies
| without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and
| monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open
| problem.
| briefcomment wrote:
| > forced ads
|
| Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are
| entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up
| some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content
| creator would reasonably allow.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader
|
| Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt
| from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is
| very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g.
| two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes
| full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls).
| The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on
| purpose.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| How recently? Up until Wednesday last week, I believe every
| single ad was placed by the creator. Some just go more wild
| with it than others.
|
| (disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
| briefcomment wrote:
| Hm, this was a few weeks ago. I just thought it was
| ridiculous that a creator would put an ad every three
| minutes on a three hour video. I guess it's possible.
|
| There were some other creators that I saw some less
| egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I
| thought would go against their general ethos (like ads
| every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is
| generally against a culture of over-capitalization).
|
| Maybe A/B tests?
| mavsman wrote:
| I once swore to myself that I'd never monetize videos. Now my
| small-time channel has ads before my videos and I don't even
| have enough watch-time (yet) to monetize them to grab the
| pennies that could be mine.
|
| Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to
| monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it
| would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the
| pennies I deserve.
| freeopinion wrote:
| You can monetize your videos from day 1. Just line up
| sponsors. If you want you can embed ads for your sponsors.
|
| Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some
| actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
| mavhc wrote:
| It's as if Google doesn't want to host the world's videos for
| free
| justbored123 wrote:
| I have to ask the obvious question here: How do you plan to
| maintain the second largest website on the internet that has
| high bandwidth demands to serve 4k video content and serves 122
| million users a day, 2+ billion a month if you are not willing
| to even tolerate simple adds that you can easily bypass in 1
| minute of your time by installing an add blocker or downloading
| Brave browser or God forbid paying 10 dollars a month?
|
| My friends will not even host the torrent that they just
| downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what
| torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good
| luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really
| happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the
| Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
| elwell wrote:
| Can you add advertiser-unfriendly content to your video to
| avoid YouTube forcing ads?
| freeopinion wrote:
| You can add advertiser-unfriendly content. You can add
| Youtube-unfriendly content. But that won't necessarily
| prevent Youtube from forcing ads.
|
| Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you
| use a service with which you are unfriendly?
| CharlesW wrote:
| You can turn off ads.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
| somethingor wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtub
| e...
| flaque wrote:
| Somewhat of a plug (apologies), but we're bootstrapping an open
| platform for video on top of RSS to solve this problem.
|
| It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already
| have on their phones. Here's an example:
| https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into
| your podcasting app)
|
| We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like
| interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's
| fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or
| roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And
| since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already
| thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and
| monetization strategies.
|
| If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads
| on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the
| video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at
| least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the
| wealthiest companies in the world.
|
| It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an
| email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here:
| https://streambus.com/
| swiley wrote:
| That's awesome to hear, I'm a little surprised videos in RSS
| have been so unpopular, the UX is pretty amazing and all the
| tools are there ready to go.
| flaque wrote:
| It's still a bit clunky. Not every app supports every video
| format, and RSS doesn't cleanly do fallbacks.
|
| Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that
| smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating
| backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as
| creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8
| natively.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| RSS is definitely a useful technology.
|
| What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon
| user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed
| as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated
| instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
|
| This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in
| numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a
| flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more
| addictive and a greater timesuck).
|
| But the ability to be notified of new content from within
| what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS
| reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-
| frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or
| poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out,
| that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
|
| The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that
| is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication
| channels are seen as _appropriating value_ from the sites is
| also problematic. It 's endemic to both advertising and
| surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet
| another case of how such practices when widely adopted
| actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
| flaque wrote:
| > This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in
| numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a
| flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is
| more addictive and a greater timesuck).
|
| I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept
| somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was
| working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
|
| The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just
| interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my
| brain.
| huslage wrote:
| Just here to point out that you can actually pay for YouTube.
| It's $12/mo (https://www.youtube.com/premium).
|
| I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those
| "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I can,
| but let's not forget that YouTube is serving a billion hours of
| video a day, which costs.
|
| If you don't want ads to appear on your videos, you can host
| the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use
| another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming
| performance or audience you'd get with YouTube.
| markzzerella wrote:
| Google could easily figure out how to distribute the
| bandwidth and storage costs of that were a priority.
| freeopinion wrote:
| The original submission here is related to solvespace. Why
| would solvespace want to have a bigger audience for these
| videos than just the people who visit their site? And why
| couldn't they meet the streaming needs of that audience just
| as well as youtube?
|
| If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience
| beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you
| yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the
| advertising firm you use to advertise is using your
| advertisement to advertise.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Personally I'd miss the discoverability that YouTube
| provides. Actually I miss it already since they nerfed
| their algorithm. Maybe we should be building better
| directories and searches?
| freeopinion wrote:
| I'm guessing your use case is different. Solvespace
| doesn't need youtube for discoverability of these videos.
| These are not ad videos. They are tutorials. So why not
| host them on the same site as you host the software
| downloads?
|
| Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd
| that people complain about ads on a service they use for
| advertising.
| regularfry wrote:
| They've also dramatically increased the proportion and
| intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking
| advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive audience.
| slinkyblack wrote:
| I would also argue that part of the reason for the
| escalation of ads is spread of ad blocking. They have fewer
| users they can monetize, so they have to monetize those
| users more.
| pixxel wrote:
| Do you know the percentage of users that use ad blocking
| on YT?
| slinkyblack wrote:
| No idea, but I know it's a self defeating cycle. I
| started blocking ads because they were getting annoying,
| I'm sure many other do the same.
| justbored123 wrote:
| You know that you can pay the same that you pay for Netflix
| and have no adds right?
| josteink wrote:
| > They've also dramatically increased the proportion and
| intrusiveness of those ads over the last year, taking
| advantage of a near-monopoly position and a captive
| audience.
|
| Agreed.
|
| But they didn't do this until _after_ providing you with
| the option to pay for ad-free.
|
| If ads bother you that much _really_ , just put up and pay
| for it. Your problem will be solved across all your
| machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a
| minute.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Google created this "problem" and they also created a
| "solution" for it.
|
| A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all
| possible.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| What monopoly?
|
| I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
| pta2002 wrote:
| If anything, YouTube is even more of a monopoly than
| Google, because while other search engines can index the
| same internet and show similar results, YouTube
| competitors don't have the creators behind them to create
| content for them, and the creators don't want to create
| content for these platforms since they don't have the
| users.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Alternatively you host your videos on both your own Peertube
| site as well as Youtube and direct Youtube-visitors to either
| Peertube, Invidious [2] or - if they're using Android -
| NewPipe. If they are command-line savvy they can use youtube-
| dl or one of the mediaplayers which make use of its
| functionality (mpv, VLC, smplayer etc). In other words there
| are many ways to both have your cake and eat it here. Self-
| hosted Peertube with Youtube as CDN and discovery network
| gives you the best of both worlds. If Google ever decides
| your videos don't fit the desired narrative you won't be left
| out in the cold. By self-hosting you also avoid being branded
| _-ist or_ -phobe just because you happen to use some
| alternative video platform (Odysee etc) which also hosts
| content made by others.
|
| [1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube
|
| [2] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
|
| [3] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
| dmos62 wrote:
| If only NewPipe had access to Google's recommendation
| engine (or its dataset). That's the only reason why I'm on
| youtube.com a lot.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Hm, I actually see this as an advantage of these
| alternative frontends since there is far less incentive
| to be pulled down some rabbit hole. Without
| recommendations and autoplay the thing just plays the
| video you point it at and stops without trying to entice
| you to stay just a bit longer [1].
|
| [1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another
| visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER...
| https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Is Invidious anything _other_ than a YouTube proxy?
|
| Is there Invidious-native content?
|
| (Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ...
| limited and limiting.)
| the_third_wave wrote:
| No, it is only a proxy. For native content Peertube is a
| good option, I've been running it for a few years without
| any real problems, starting out on a machine with a
| Pentium E2220 and 2GB of RAM (video transcoding was...
| slow... but once transcoded it worked fine), later moving
| to less anaemic hardware.
|
| Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads,
| it actually makes Youtube content useable on older
| hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now -
| where the "official" interface and player are close to
| useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are
| proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing
| habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to
| follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can
| _not_ help against censorship, when Google removes
| content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I
| 've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have
| had videos removed which _does_ help against censorship -
| run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and
| mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done
| anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube
| account.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| > I hate YouTube ads and do my best to block them where I
| can, but let's not forget that YouTube is serving a billion
| hours of video a day, which costs.
|
| You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours
| of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain
| the site?
|
| Why not pay for premium?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| They don't deserve my subscription, their ads are too
| annoying and intrusive. Seriously, a 20 minute video can
| contain 6 midrolls. I recently tried to watch some video
| about how singapore is the only succesful dictatorship and
| instead it kept getting interrupted mid-sentence.
|
| At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a
| better signal to noise ratio.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| What are the costs involved in hosting for a single 10
| minute 720p video?
| maccard wrote:
| Assuming it's 50MB compressed, about 0.1c per month to
| store it, 0.4c per view for bandwidth, plus cpu cost to
| stream it(unsure of how much this costs), plus
| transcoding costs on upload.(based on gcp storage costs)
|
| Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to
| the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
|
| Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though.
| Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site
| comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes
| from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true
| here, the value of your video being on youtube is it
| being in a storefront.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| > about 0.1c per month to store it, > 0.4c per view for
| bandwidth
|
| No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You
| wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers
| in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.
| maccard wrote:
| Those estimates are taken from the gcp pricing page [0]
| that say $0.02 (or 2c) per GB. Have you a source for your
| claim that I'm wrong?
|
| [0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#price-tables
| sdenton4 wrote:
| ...and then all the complexity starts. You really want to
| store many transcodes, and send a transcode appropriate
| for the combination of device and bandwidth. No point
| wasting money on bandwidth sending a 4k video to a small
| smartphone on a dicey mobile connection, after all.
|
| Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no
| matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and
| improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at
| the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and
| business arrangements.
|
| If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes
| viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth
| charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
|
| Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses
| outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the
| engineering complexity alone.
| duxup wrote:
| >it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and
| motivation is avarice
|
| And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of
| using their service.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than
| renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay
| for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a
| gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say,
| $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.
| max46 wrote:
| It's called Youtube Premium and the vast majority of people
| of the internet made it very clear they will never pay for it
| even if the ads are driving them crazy.
|
| Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than
| normal views.
|
| Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube
| are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the
| platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your
| video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization
| wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on
| them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis
| videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads
| next to them that they will be listed in their article if
| they don't stop doing business with youtube)
| Chris2048 wrote:
| If YT demonetizes you, do you still get money from premium
| viewers?
| knorker wrote:
| I don't have a reference for you, but when I last
| researched this the answer was "yes".
|
| Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder
| is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then
| is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for
| "advertiser-unfriendly" content.
| danShumway wrote:
| I did subscribe to Youtube premium for a pretty decent
| chunk of time, I think a couple of years, and it was
| specifically to support creators. It's a worse experience
| than adblocking, not just in terms of cost, but purely in
| terms of the service itself.
|
| It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of
| the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine.
| However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on
| Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop
| constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten
| better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get
| me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually
| getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the
| ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird
| format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or
| errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app
| also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a
| program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything
| their app does but better.
|
| The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out
| that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on
| my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on
| both at the same time, which... nothing else has that
| problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I
| can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into
| Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging
| out of it.
|
| I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a
| month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock
| Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the
| creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the
| point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with
| Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even
| that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So
| I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people
| money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more
| valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I
| get very slightly better privacy.
|
| It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's
| that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I
| wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a
| month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube
| Premium was at the time I was subscribed.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I'm torn, because on the one hand, yes, YT ~deserves to get
| paid for their product. On the other hand, as a user, it
| feels like they intentionally made the free tier worse -
| more ads, removing features - to try and get people to pay,
| which makes me want to avoid giving them money. It feels
| like rewarding them for solving a problem that they
| artificially created.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I've been paying for YouTube Premium for a few months now
| and absolutely love it. If I ever get logged out it's a
| horrible reminder of how annoying the ads are.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's sort of my point. You could also look at Vimeo vs.
| YouTube.
|
| There's also the point that pretty much every time a
| paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably
| post some work around to the paywall.
| larrykubin wrote:
| YouTube Premium has tens of millions of subscribers, tons
| of people use it. I use it so much that I would cancel
| Netflix before I would cancel YouTube Premium.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I see a lot of negative about YT premium online but I've
| been using it for years.. I don't know how you can use the
| YT app on mobile without it.
| MikusR wrote:
| https://vancedapp.com/
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| How about we stop pushing these alternatives that ensure
| creators never get paid?
|
| It's hard work to make content, many channels are run
| full time. I know people hate ads, and if that's the
| case, just pay for Premium.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If they please they can easily make content premium only
| instead of relying on people's willingness to see ads. If
| people can with a few clicks see no ads then 10-25% of
| people will probably do so while the majority continue to
| watch ads. Content isn't premium only because they have
| already run the numbers and they get more from the
| majority that watch the ads than they would by putting it
| behind a paywall.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Does premium fee go to content authors?
| knorker wrote:
| Like with ad revenue, it's a split between content
| creator and Google.
|
| They're being secretive about exactly how that split
| works.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Yeah. It might depend on the channel, but I saw one
| creator (maybe CGP Grey?) say that they make more from a
| YT Premium viewer than an ad-supported one
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| i used to be all about these workarounds when I was
| younger. now $10/mo saves a lot of hassle.
| throwaddzuzxd wrote:
| You still have sponsored segments even with Youtube
| premium. I refuse to pay for a service and still get ads.
| peruvian wrote:
| YouTube Premium is overpriced because it includes Music and
| other stuff. Easy way around that is signing up using a VPN
| in Russia or India. My YTP costs $3/mo.
| fragile_frogs wrote:
| I have been using YouTube Premium from day one and I
| absolutely love it.
| Xelbair wrote:
| The people who are willing to pay for such subscription are
| the most valuable to advertisers.
|
| They will offer way more money than you can offer for the
| service.
| riveducha wrote:
| I am a small time Youtuber with a monetized channel. There
| are two things to consider for anyone thinking about ads on
| YouTube.
|
| One is that subscribing to YT Premium will get rid of all the
| ads. (You can't get rid of sponsor shoutouts with Premium,
| though.) From the data that YouTube gives me, only a tiny
| fraction of my revenue comes from Premium users. I assume
| this means only a tiny fraction of users have Premium.
|
| Second, if you are in YPP (monetized channel), you can choose
| which videos have ads and when the ads appear. One workaround
| I've seen people use is to get accepted into YPP and then use
| that to turn off ads. The Zig channel would qualify given its
| viewership.
|
| Not advocating for one way over another, just wanted to add
| info.
| m0llusk wrote:
| There are lots of ways to make money with content that do not
| involve charging for copies. One of the most popular and
| promising is the pay to release model where a preview may be
| free but the product is only released in full once enough
| money has been spent on it. This a more flexible approach
| that does not lock producers into a particular price
| structure or production schedule. Now that copies no longer
| have significant cost or barriers it is necessary to move
| away from making exchange of copies the primary point of
| revenue generation.
| underseacables wrote:
| However that subscription access might dilute their control.
| What bothers me about YouTube is how they try to police
| content and censor (ie the Wuhan lab leak). If there's a
| stronger model where viewers do pay (and not just rent to use
| your word) then YouTube may feel they have less control to
| censor.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Why can't we just have a publicly owned video site that is
| paid for by all of us? We all use YouTube so it seems like a
| prime fit for public infrastructure. This would guarantee 1A
| rights to political speech and journalism, as well as remove
| advertising and engagement incentives.
| jsilence wrote:
| Because even if you pay they will eventually insert ads
| into your feed. See Amazon Prime lately. So what is the
| point?
| artificial wrote:
| Was it HBO that pioneered this model?
| freeopinion wrote:
| The concept of "publicly owned" is interesting. When a
| company is listed on an open stock exchange and anybody is
| allowed to purchase a piece of ownership and be able to
| vote as a shareholder, that is "privately owned." When a
| "company" is controlled by the government and the public
| has no say in who is appointed to make decisions for that
| organization, the company is "publicly owned." For a
| publicly owned entity, the public can, in theory, vote in a
| politician who can appoint somebody to appoint somebody to
| control the entity.
|
| So privately owned companies can be directly controlled by
| their owners in proportion to the amount of ownership.
| Publicly owned companies cannot usually be directly
| controlled by their owners, but can be indirectly
| controlled in proportion to the political power of the
| owner.
| tehjoker wrote:
| > 90% of all stock is owned institutionally. It is
| impossible to compare the stock market with a
| representative democracy. In the former, the wealthy
| rule, in the latter, the poor have a chance by virtue of
| sheer numbers.
|
| In a private company, you have no chance of appeal. In a
| government, you at least have elections. The worst most
| corrosive parts of our government come from its contact
| with the wealthy and the corporate sector and those
| aspiring to become them.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Who do you trust to run it?
| tehjoker wrote:
| Any representative body would do better than a corporate
| monarchy.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "Any representative body would do better than a
| corporate monarchy."
|
| In theory I wanna agree with you, but in practice,
| "representative bodies" often represent their corporate
| masters far more than they do the will of the people.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > say, $100/year
|
| How much of that is hosting, and how much is content?
| robotnikman wrote:
| I remember way when youtube first started they had a premium
| subscription option which allowed you to upload longer and
| higher quality videos. If you didnt have a subscription you
| were limited to 10 minutes per video
| Y_Y wrote:
| I pay for Nebula. It has a lot of the YouTube channels I was
| already watching and isn't evil.
|
| https://nebula.app/
|
| I will sometimes user NewPipe even to view their videos
| though. The Android app needs work.
| rvz wrote:
| He made the right choice there. It's not fit for purpose for
| small creators or users anymore and the big established media
| players have spoilt it for them.
|
| Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know
| that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims
| to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership
| governed by 'The Algorithm'.
|
| For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best
| described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and
| surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily
| basis.
|
| One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could
| be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem
| like _' freedom'_ as YouTube describes it. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/about/
| leephillips wrote:
| In the early days of TV, when the first broadcast licenses were
| being granted, there was a legislative proposal to make
| advertising on TV illegal. It was defeated, resulting in a
| century of TV that was largely a wasteland in the service of the
| tobacco and fast food industries. We have a political choice.
| stickfigure wrote:
| What do you imagine the alternative world of 100% ad-free
| television would look like? Hundreds of channels of PBS? I
| think that is naively optimistic.
| leephillips wrote:
| I don't know what it would have looked like, obviously. But I
| think it would have been better than what we got. Even having
| just two or three PBS-type channels and subtracting the rest
| would have been an improvement.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| > We have a political choice.
|
| Do we though? It seems to me that a few very wealthy people
| have choices. The rest of us are simply along for the ride.
| iluvcommunism wrote:
| Lots of discussion on advertising. None on the blacklisting &
| censorship by YouTube of millions of American opinions. Of course
| HN is a liberal website, so this is welcomed.
| [deleted]
| goatmeal wrote:
| I recently set up peertube on a $5 VPS using yunohost and it was
| very easy. definitely would need more work if I got more than 10
| little views a day.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| I understand and a sympathize with his opinion, at the same time
| the platform must be financed somehow, no?
|
| Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical
| standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues
| watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia
| and the US.
|
| For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth
| it for me.
| rchaud wrote:
| Yes, the platform must be financed somehow. However, that
| 'somehow' didn't seem to be an issue for 15 years.
|
| A video series about parametric 2d/3d CAD is not going to do
| Logan Paul numbers, so what merit is there to jam ads into it
| anyway?
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| > However, that 'somehow' didn't seem to be an issue for 15
| years.
|
| It has absolutely been an issue. If you listen in on the
| earnings call, shareholders have been asking for YouTube
| revenue for years. Google has to show it can be a profitable
| business.
| rchaud wrote:
| Asking about revenue is not the same as asking about
| profit. In any case, the 80-20 principle still applies.
| Monetizing already successful content categories will
| deliver far more profit than long-tail niche content that
| far fewer people see.
| syrrim wrote:
| It the tail is fat, then it absolutely matters to youtube
| that it is monetized as well. The value proposition of
| youtube over traditional media has long been that it
| offers a chance for individuals to be seen, though I
| don't know to what degree that is still the primary
| value. Even if it isn't, it costs more per view for
| youtube to serve less popular videos, since they still
| need to be distributed around the world. Even if it isn't
| necessary, it would still be fair for those videos to see
| at least as much advertising.
| EugeneG wrote:
| Don't like them, don't watch/upload. Just like he did. They
| can put in as many ads as they want, and those who are
| bothered can refuse to watch.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'll just keep using Ublock, thanks.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| Some examples of what the OP means by "lost sovereignty" would be
| useful. I assume he means ability to monetize how he wants, or to
| avoid algorithmic claims against his work etc....but who knows -
| the author does not explain.
| _wldu wrote:
| In general, when we use someone's platform to publish, we give
| up control. People continually rediscover this fact. If you
| want more control, publish on a standard website on a standard
| Linux machine.
| serf wrote:
| >In general, when we use someone's platform to publish, we
| give up control. People continually rediscover this fact.
|
| In broad strokes : you're right.
|
| For the sake of a bit more nuance, i'd like to add that 'the
| control' isn't just given up by the user. 'The control' is
| promised by providers, and then slowly dwindled until some
| threshold is met where users are lost to competitors.
|
| YouTube became popular because it gave creators just enough
| independence, while handling the technical stuff for them.
|
| Now that the technical part is becoming increasingly easy to
| deal with, it stands to reason that YouTube must become _more
| flexible_ , or lose market share.
|
| Will G/YT be flexible enough to keep everyone happy enough to
| exist within their walled garden? Personally, I don't think
| so -- and people like the parent article are proving that
| point by packing up and taking their data elsewhere.
|
| Discoverability is becoming less and less of an issue due to
| the pervasiveness of many different types and styles of
| social media; IMO that's YT's big advantage and I feel with
| anti-creator stuff like this stuff, along with YTs
| recommender being one of the biggest industry in-jokes on the
| planet -- they really squandered that advantage.
| input_sh wrote:
| Mentioned in the first minute here:
| https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671...
|
| He had no intention to ever monetise the channel, but with
| YouTube's ToS update he had to agree that YouTube can monetise
| his channel even if he doesn't want it to.
|
| Considering he's basically forced to serve ads he has no
| control over and he does not earn a cent from it, I'd say "lost
| sovereignty" holds true.
| izacus wrote:
| Was his expectation that YouTube would cover his hosting,
| encoding and bandwidth costs for free forever? I wonder what
| his backup plan is and where will he host the videos now.
|
| (It's still kind of wierd that YouTube doesn't support simply
| paying for their hosting.)
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| this is the shittiest take.
|
| does youtube expect him to keep giving them content free
| forever ? without contributing to his production costs ?
| ikiris wrote:
| Which do you think costs more?
|
| I can tell you the marginal value for most all content is
| basically zero. The hosting costs aren't.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| it obviously costs more to produce content than it does
| to host and stream it.
|
| That's why you watch a show costing 10 millions dollars
| per episode, for 10 bucks a month.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| What about the marginal cost to host a channel that gets
| < 1000 views per year?
| EugeneG wrote:
| They don't expect that. They create an incentive
| structure to attract creators they want at the price they
| want and are ok I assume if others choose to not work
| with them. It's not like YouTube called him and said "hey
| what the heck man, why did you stop uploading?"
| exhilaration wrote:
| I can't speak for him, but yes, I was (foolishly) expecting
| free YouTube hosting forever without ads because that's
| what they've always provided. I would think that enough
| YouTube content makers opt into ads and monetization to
| cover the costs for those of us that don't want it.
| briefcomment wrote:
| One possibility would be for YouTube to take a larger cut
| from content creators that do monetize, and the leave the
| unmonetized content alone.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What does he expect for a site that serves his videos _for
| free_ , not to mention recommends them to people as well to
| get a wider audience?
|
| "Sovereignty" is a bizarre word here. It's a _business deal_.
| Nobody 's ever "sovereign" in any exchange, it's either a
| good deal or not.
|
| If he wants to pay for hosting himself, then go ahead, but no
| need to act like it's a question of "sovereignty". Nobody's a
| king here.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What does he expect for a site that serves his videos
| for free, not to mention recommends them to people as well
| to get a wider audience?
|
| Lets turn that around. YouTube is a huge content provider
| that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR FREE and
| they feel that they can "monetize" it any way they see fit.
| There needs to be some balance. If enough people leave like
| this, there will be a credible competitor to YouTube and
| they'll never get those people back. Better yet, self
| hosting and federated services will start to become a thing
| and that could be an existential threat to Google itself.
|
| But sure, they are free to do what they like on their
| platform. Doesn't mean it's always the best thing to do.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _that has 100 percent of their content provided FOR
| FREE_
|
| Not true. Creators can get paid for their video views and
| some make a living at it. Some of the content Google
| doesn't pay anything for, but tons of it (and most of the
| popular stuff) Google pays for on a per-view basis. It's
| not free to Google.
|
| > _There needs to be some balance._
|
| That already is the balance, Google paying creators for
| the popular content.
| upofadown wrote:
| The business deal used to be good. Now there is a
| sovereignty problem. The free part is not relevant here. We
| can't help that Google is having problems monetizing a
| service by first providing an acceptable service and then
| later changing the terms of the deal. Perhaps their
| business model is unrealistic.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Perhaps it would be useful for competition to require
| media platforms provide content creators a way out. E.g.
| a mandatory "redirect to my new site" option.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Google isn't having problems monetizing... their business
| model is _entirely_ realistic, in fact it 's wildly
| successful.
|
| Perhaps the business deal was _too_ good before, and now
| it 's merely good? Previously it was "acceptable" for
| them to store and host your videos for zero cost and show
| them without ads, and now you think it's "unrealistic"
| for them to finally cover those costs with ads?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > their business model .. wildly successful
|
| On what basis? They has an old model, build up the
| success of the platform, then changed the model. On what
| basis can we judge the new model successful versus the
| momentum of the old model?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _On what basis?_
|
| Literally the line that says "YouTube ads" in their
| quarterly report?
|
| 2020 Q1 was $4 billion, 2021 Q1 was $6 billion. [1]
|
| Seems like wild success to me. But, you know, keep
| checking for the next few quarters if you're convinced
| Google is killing their golden goose. They've got some
| pretty smart business analysts and product people over
| there though, I wouldn't bet against them.
|
| [1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20210428_alphabet
| _10Q.pd...
| tyingq wrote:
| A transcript of his video _" I'm leaving YouTube"_, that I
| pulled from the closed caption file[1]
|
| https://pastebin.com/8ZTwaJEm
|
| [1] https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/lazy-static/video-
| caption...
| elliekelly wrote:
| He posted a video[1] about why he left. It sounds like YouTube
| updated terms of service that required him to allow YouTube to
| put ads in his videos and he never wanted to monetize his work,
| he's making the videos to share information, not to make money
| for him or anyone else.
|
| [1]https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/videos/watch/6b779810-671
| ...
| RL_Quine wrote:
| Evil company decides not to take a loss on hosting probably
| zettabytes of video?
|
| It's really hard to paint youtube as the villain here and
| keep a straight face.
| danparsonson wrote:
| "Poor giant video hosting company has to play multiple ads
| before, during and after every video otherwise they go
| broke" doesn't really work either. Having the most content
| available to show viewers has made them the de facto video
| sharing website - videos freely contributed by people who
| wanted to share something with the world have helped to put
| YT in the position where they are basically a monopoly and
| they are now aggressively capitalising on that. I don't
| believe they need to monetise everything just to keep the
| lights on.
|
| Ultimately though, the guy doesn't want his content
| monetised so he's removing it - that's his prerogative just
| as much as it is Youtube's for advertising however they
| please.
| EugeneG wrote:
| Not a monopoly there's a ton of video sharing sites -
| like I guess peertube? Creators can walk away and bring
| their business elsewhere, as he did.
|
| YouTube happens to be very good at advertising your
| videos and driving you viewers (just like, say, NBC was
| good at bringing viewers to Seinfeld).
| serf wrote:
| no one called anyone a villain, but most will agree that
| having the terms of service changed out from under you
| after you already have hosted content/a social following/an
| internet 'home' is a pretty shitty thing to experience.
|
| does the means justify the ends? should this be allowed to
| ensure that the YT bottom line isn't red? I don't know; all
| I know is that the personal experience of the content
| creator got to such a negative point that they decided to
| forego all the benefits of YouTube and host elsewhere --
| and that's really the only point that matters.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| nobody called anyone a villain. he simply didn't like the
| change and moved to a new service. basic free market forces
| working well and we can all be happy about it
| acomjean wrote:
| Thats a good point. Hosting isn't free, so someone is going
| to have to pay some cost. Even if the original goal was
| just to share information and not profit, there are some
| costs associated with running a site.
|
| One wonders if youtube had an option for you to pay them to
| host videos for you without ads, if that would be popular.
| Of course then someone with a 1 million+ view video and a
| large bill would then start complaining..
|
| You can always host yourself but you loose the audience
| youtube brings.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| I use IPFS and host my media (mainly photography) on my domain.
| (With cloudflare as a IPFS gateway in case a visitor doesn't use
| IPFS)
|
| Hosting cost: $0.
|
| Some details: https://fabian.social/posts/2020-11-07-ipfs-
| blogging.html
|
| Example: https://fabian.social/photography/2021-01-15-incidentes-
| vial...
| robjan wrote:
| There's a small cost of keeping your computer on 24/7 if you
| aren't using a pinning service, but it can be pretty cheap if
| you use something like a raspberry pi
| fabianhjr wrote:
| Cloudflare does some caching, in my experience up to a week,
| and pinata.cloud (pinning service) has a great free tier and
| API.
| tantalor wrote:
| Video consumes quite a bit more than imagery.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| Though, if you are creating videos you would keep at least
| your original project export locally (either on your computer
| or a NAS) so exposing the content wouldn't require additional
| space.
| Zababa wrote:
| That's a good example. I've visited a few IPFS websites and
| they were terribly slow to load, but yours was as fast as a
| regular blog.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I've briefly tried hosting with IPFS in the past and always
| found it to be super slow/not working at all.
|
| If one has a super low traffic site and is already hosting
| themselves (whether on a home computer or VPS), what's the
| benefit of IPFS? My understanding is that if a file isn't
| popular, it'll be served by your own IPFS node/pulled from your
| local web server, which seems redundant to me.
|
| (I totally get the use case for popular files; it's awesome for
| that!)
| fabianhjr wrote:
| My main argument (even for low traffic sites) is the
| following:
|
| > Centralized personal sites/blogs become fragile and
| expensive while a decent(ralized) alternative (like what is
| in use here) is anti-fragile and inexpensive.
|
| > The only costs are the domain registration and running my
| own computer (where the IPFS daemon takes less than 1% of my
| cpu usage and 200 MB of memory) and some bandwidth.
|
| > The more popular something is, the more peers replicate it.
|
| > As such more bandwidth and redundant fetch locations become
| available that could get the content to you (the reader) at
| lower latencies. (It is challenging to do a hug of death /
| slashdotting on such sites/blogs)
| reedjosh wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the example. I've been wanting to do this
| myself soon.
| Popegaf wrote:
| That's nice information to have. Cloudfare IPFS is new to me.
| Seems to be like the ipfs.io gateway.
|
| I think it would be really cool if there some super easy way to
| do IPFS blogging. Some GUI or CLI that you point at a repo for
| the source, then a host with a username, password or SSH key, a
| dropdown with your domain name registrar and your
| username+password, and finally a big "deploy" button.
|
| DNS-link is no fun setting up and maintaining. Sure, you can
| write your own scripts and connect everything to a CI/CD, but
| for budding developers that's a lot of work.
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