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The vast majority of the stuff I watch on YouTube would get made without any monetisation. I'm talking about people making videos of their hobbies or crafts etc

The vast majority of the stuff I watch on YouTube would get made without any monetisation. I'm talking about people making videos of their hobbies or crafts etc. I have no interest at all in the videos that only exist because of the money (like mindless waste of bandwidth like Mr Beast etc). I don't want 4K, 3D or any of that crap. Blogs etc, including images, have been available for free for 20 years at least. I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. But Google went the monopoly route with YouTube. I will not reward them for that.

ok_dad 3y ago
Much the content I watch would not get created by the experts on those channels, they would be working a 9-5 job doing less interesting things, or just not make videos. Video in 4k or even 1080 is expensive in bandwidth, your arguments about 20 year old free blogs are dumb.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Then pay for your shit. "Your argument is dumb" is not a valid counter-argument.
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    I do pay for it. I could very well dismiss your argument as, “don’t watch YouTube and stop complaining if you won’t pay.” I’m not sorry you felt hurt that your ignorance was called out.
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      What ignorance? I've been downloading high resolution videos since before Youtube even existed. Are you perhaps the ignorant one?
e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes of video every day for basically free, then you'd be rich. The simple truth is that bandwidth is not free. The numbers are, of course, not public, but Cloudflare published some stuff here https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... that we can use to guesstimate. Google likely has more peering agreements, but it still costs money. That's just bandwidth, serving video also costs compute (re-encoding the video in a bunch of resolutions is not free), and running the software to serve the video is also expensive, memory, storage to store said video, and generally just hundreds of datacenters around the world. You can serve a million RPS of static HTML on a crappy server in a closet for a few thousand dollars, but you absolutely cannot do the same for video.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Everyone seems to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not saying a service like YouTube can be free. YouTube contains tons of low quality, pointless videos. Literally "content" (they even use that word themselves). You're thinking of all the millions of views of Mr Beast or the countless hours of turnkey video content like ASMR that get uploaded every day. I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"? In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all. As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it. Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?
belltaco 3y ago
> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. But Google went the monopoly route with YouTube. I will not reward them for that. What's stopping you from creating a service for free videos if you're so convinced? Or atleast throw together a plan for this so someone else can create it.

ok_dad 3y ago

Much the content I watch would not get created by the experts on those channels, they would be working a 9-5 job doing less interesting things, or just not make videos. Video in 4k or even 1080 is expensive in bandwidth, your arguments about 20 year old free blogs are dumb.

globular-toast 3y ago
Then pay for your shit. "Your argument is dumb" is not a valid counter-argument.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  I do pay for it. I could very well dismiss your argument as, “don’t watch YouTube and stop complaining if you won’t pay.” I’m not sorry you felt hurt that your ignorance was called out.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    What ignorance? I've been downloading high resolution videos since before Youtube even existed. Are you perhaps the ignorant one?

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago

> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. If you can figure out a way to serve petabytes of video every day for basically free, then you'd be rich. The simple truth is that bandwidth is not free. The numbers are, of course, not public, but Cloudflare published some stuff here https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... that we can use to guesstimate. Google likely has more peering agreements, but it still costs money. That's just bandwidth, serving video also costs compute (re-encoding the video in a bunch of resolutions is not free), and running the software to serve the video is also expensive, memory, storage to store said video, and generally just hundreds of datacenters around the world. You can serve a million RPS of static HTML on a crappy server in a closet for a few thousand dollars, but you absolutely cannot do the same for video.

globular-toast 3y ago
Everyone seems to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not saying a service like YouTube can be free. YouTube contains tons of low quality, pointless videos. Literally "content" (they even use that word themselves). You're thinking of all the millions of views of Mr Beast or the countless hours of turnkey video content like ASMR that get uploaded every day. I'm think of everyone serving their videos themselves like people have served text for decades. Do you really think your average HN blog post in video format would amount to "petabytes of video"? In other words, the technology I'm talking about here is the World Wide Web. That's all. As for encoding etc, that's dead easy and most people have the hardware at home to handle it. Bandwidth isn't free; I never said it was, but people already pay for their bandwidth as part of their ISP deal. Why do you expect people to pay twice?

belltaco 3y ago

> I'm convinced that by now after decades of bandwidth improvements etc we'd have free videos in the same way. But Google went the monopoly route with YouTube. I will not reward them for that. What's stopping you from creating a service for free videos if you're so convinced? Or atleast throw together a plan for this so someone else can create it.