5 ms·

Video storage and delivery is expensive. YouTube can make money because they're piggybacking on Google's massive infrastructure. Building a tracker/aggregator

Video storage and delivery is expensive. YouTube can make money because they're piggybacking on Google's massive infrastructure. Building a tracker/aggregator (like PeerTube etc) is straight forward. It's actually getting video content to clients that is challenging. Video is both large and sensitive to internal ordering. You need packet 1 before you can do anything with packet 2, if you have those but packet 3 is stalled you can't go forward. To serve video you need enough online storage to actually house it but then enough upstream bandwidth (and good latency) to serve it to clients in real-time. Serving up HD streams at a reasonable bitrate will quickly saturate a gigabit connection. A network of HTTP servers or even an overlay network like IPFS don't help solve these problems. Video needs a lot of storage and is very sensitive to a server's upstream capacity. Torrent based streaming can distribute that load but introduces its own problems. Torrent based streaming clients just request video content blocks in sequential order versus normal BT clients just accepting a random ordering of blocks. But again unless you've got a bunch of high bandwidth seeders it's difficult to serve content at playable rates. If the content is encoded to use 5Mb/s in order to play it back without buffering you need it delivered at least that rate. Both methods to distribute video suffer from popularity problems. If transitional servers stop hosting old/unpopular content or seeders for it drop off it becomes unavailable on the network even if it's still referenced in the aggregator. Not that YouTube is an overall good service or that monopolies in the space are good but online video is an area that gravitates towards centralization if not monopolies. If you want to compete with YouTube, or more likely Vimeo or another smaller player, you'd need to replicate their infrastructure. That's the difficult/expensive thing to build and maintain. Other self-hosted services are trivial by comparison.

ehnto 6y ago
I think these are all technical hurdles that would be solved by the hosting middlewares that pop up to serve such an ecosystem. While it would be possible for a creator to host their own, my expectation would be that they would upload them to "Source as a Service" type hosting platforms that handle this. You would also get aggregators of all sizes and advancement. From small aggregators of niche model train videos serving directly from the source, to large aggregators with their own hosting solutions they serve the source from. You're right though of course, which is why we have a YouTube monopoly in the first place.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Middleware doesn't and can't solve the distribution problem. The aggregation of content is a non-problem. Video distribution is expensive and technically complicated. Say I've got a video channel and most of my content is "talking head" style. Encoding 1080p using in a widely compatible h.264 configuration (Main profile level 3) I could easily get good quality output at a data rate between 1-2Mb/s, let's say 1.5Mb/s. That's about 11MB per minute of video for storage purposes (for that single config). In order to serve those videos to streaming clients I'll need 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth for each client. Any lower of a transfer rate and the playback will stall. Faster data rates can allow for a larger buffer but the file's data rate is your transfer minimum to actually play the content as it downloads. So back to our video channel. Self hosting on my residential connection means I'm limited by my shitty upstream bandwidth and throttling from my ISP if not outright T&C violations. My home connection I could serve maybe a half dozen clients simultaneously. So long as my content is unpopular that might be ok. Bubbling up on an aggregator or just making an interesting video would DDoS me and no one would get to see it. It I want to spend ~$60 a year on cloud hosting I could serve a lot more connections. Then I'm out $60 a year or more if I want to make a longer history of my content available, remember 11MB a minute. If I want to have better compatibility and broader reach I would need to encode a couple more versions of my videos at the cost of storage and my time. So self hosting either costs me money or severely limits the availability of my content. P2P distribution can help a little but it has its own issues. Even an aggregator offering paid hosting doesn't really solve the issue because I'm still out some money. Were I to make any money from advertising or patronage that hosting cost would come right off the top. The situation is even more difficult if you consider mobile access which is a huge portion of online video access. For a lot of reasons self hosting from mobile devices isn't practical. P2P from a mobile device is likewise impractical. So for anyone with a mobile device as their primary computing device, a non-trivial number of people, they would have to pay for some third party hosting without a meaningful self hosting option. Demand from mobile devices also significantly increases your need for multiple encodings of a video. Mobile streaming needs to respond to much more drastic traffic conditions than your laptop on your home WiFi. This increases storage requirements meaning less historic content or increased storage costs.
  - 6y ago
cwkoss 6y ago
I feel like cryptocurrency micropayments could 'solve' the seeding problem with torrents. I think licensing is the biggest issue - need a mechanism to give seeders confidence that the true content creator authorized them being compensated for seeding without being exposed to liability for IP laws. I'd love to set up a seedbox that works like a ~bitcoin mining rig but consumes upload bandwidth rather than CPU/gpu time. However I'm not sure anyone has figured out a good way to do this while avoiding copyright issues.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  I don't think micropayments (cryptocurrency or not) do anything to help the situation. The costs of seeding (electricity, bandwidth, the actual hardware) are all macroscopic costs that micropayments are never going to cover. End users do not want to deal with micropayments, they'll just watch one of the billion hours of content on YouTube. Few content creators have any sort of following that will follow them to SelfHostedTube. Self hosted video streaming (of any configuration) is competing with "free" and convenient YouTube. Unless some independent service offers a similar level of service it's not going to catch on.

ehnto 6y ago

I think these are all technical hurdles that would be solved by the hosting middlewares that pop up to serve such an ecosystem. While it would be possible for a creator to host their own, my expectation would be that they would upload them to "Source as a Service" type hosting platforms that handle this. You would also get aggregators of all sizes and advancement. From small aggregators of niche model train videos serving directly from the source, to large aggregators with their own hosting solutions they serve the source from. You're right though of course, which is why we have a YouTube monopoly in the first place.

giantrobot 6y ago
Middleware doesn't and can't solve the distribution problem. The aggregation of content is a non-problem. Video distribution is expensive and technically complicated. Say I've got a video channel and most of my content is "talking head" style. Encoding 1080p using in a widely compatible h.264 configuration (Main profile level 3) I could easily get good quality output at a data rate between 1-2Mb/s, let's say 1.5Mb/s. That's about 11MB per minute of video for storage purposes (for that single config). In order to serve those videos to streaming clients I'll need 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth for each client. Any lower of a transfer rate and the playback will stall. Faster data rates can allow for a larger buffer but the file's data rate is your transfer minimum to actually play the content as it downloads. So back to our video channel. Self hosting on my residential connection means I'm limited by my shitty upstream bandwidth and throttling from my ISP if not outright T&C violations. My home connection I could serve maybe a half dozen clients simultaneously. So long as my content is unpopular that might be ok. Bubbling up on an aggregator or just making an interesting video would DDoS me and no one would get to see it. It I want to spend ~$60 a year on cloud hosting I could serve a lot more connections. Then I'm out $60 a year or more if I want to make a longer history of my content available, remember 11MB a minute. If I want to have better compatibility and broader reach I would need to encode a couple more versions of my videos at the cost of storage and my time. So self hosting either costs me money or severely limits the availability of my content. P2P distribution can help a little but it has its own issues. Even an aggregator offering paid hosting doesn't really solve the issue because I'm still out some money. Were I to make any money from advertising or patronage that hosting cost would come right off the top. The situation is even more difficult if you consider mobile access which is a huge portion of online video access. For a lot of reasons self hosting from mobile devices isn't practical. P2P from a mobile device is likewise impractical. So for anyone with a mobile device as their primary computing device, a non-trivial number of people, they would have to pay for some third party hosting without a meaningful self hosting option. Demand from mobile devices also significantly increases your need for multiple encodings of a video. Mobile streaming needs to respond to much more drastic traffic conditions than your laptop on your home WiFi. This increases storage requirements meaning less historic content or increased storage costs.
- 6y ago

cwkoss 6y ago

I feel like cryptocurrency micropayments could 'solve' the seeding problem with torrents. I think licensing is the biggest issue - need a mechanism to give seeders confidence that the true content creator authorized them being compensated for seeding without being exposed to liability for IP laws. I'd love to set up a seedbox that works like a ~bitcoin mining rig but consumes upload bandwidth rather than CPU/gpu time. However I'm not sure anyone has figured out a good way to do this while avoiding copyright issues.

giantrobot 6y ago
I don't think micropayments (cryptocurrency or not) do anything to help the situation. The costs of seeding (electricity, bandwidth, the actual hardware) are all macroscopic costs that micropayments are never going to cover. End users do not want to deal with micropayments, they'll just watch one of the billion hours of content on YouTube. Few content creators have any sort of following that will follow them to SelfHostedTube. Self hosted video streaming (of any configuration) is competing with "free" and convenient YouTube. Unless some independent service offers a similar level of service it's not going to catch on.