4 ms·

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.

Zekio 3y ago
that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either. You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations
thomastjeffery 3y ago
A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either. End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something. Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight. If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.
- wutwutwat 3y ago
  You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators. BT is not a magic bullet, it's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it wasn't giant bandwidth hungry companies like yt and netflix would have been using it 10 years ago, along with every cdn on the planet
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine. The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest. The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted. The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof). Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works: - Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations) - Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio - Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.
dietr1ch 3y ago
We don't need a cache site, but to be able to have a shared content addressed storage. I wish a single technology is developed for this, and then I don't mind if privates sites act as peers, I'd love to be able to share games I downloaded or videos I recently saw locally. It took Steam like 20yr to support sharing on the local network (with Google/Facebook/Netflix with no sharing in sight). I think that's insane and shows that hardware has been improving too fast in some sense.
- lakomen 3y ago
  I'd even like to sell off those games. But the mafia, sorry lobby is too strong, to well smeared.
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
  Isn't this what IPFS promised and sorta delivered?
matheusmoreira 3y ago
The bandwidth problem has already been solved by peer to peer file sharing. The only reason this solution is not widely deployed is copyright.

I doubt that pirate sites that cache video will become popular, as they would have similar cost problems as the original youtube, but without Google's infinite pockets.

Zekio 3y ago

that is pretty easily solved with peer to peer

ThatPlayer 3y ago
It doesn't scale to anything mainstream these days when the majority of people are on phones and laptops. Battery-powered devices that don't offer much storage nor constantly reliable internet. Smart TVs generally don't have a lot of storage either. You can't even have it run in the background on iOS because of their background application limitations

thomastjeffery 3y ago

A CDN is only expensive because it is inefficient. With bittorrent you can let end users be the infrastructure.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
Which the majority of end users don't want to be. Anyone on a laptop or phone don't want to be draining their battery and eating their bandwidth.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  True, but they don't want to be buying Netflix dinner every month either. End users have not been meaningfully presented the compromise. If they had, they would have more motivation to get mains-powered PCs, or even a seedbox or something. Besides, uploading content isn't a significant hit on battery life unless you are doing it instead of suspend. Most of your battery is going into your backlight. If it wasn't illegal to seed copyrighted content, we wouldn't need users to seed all night. We would just set up a few strategic public seedboxes instead.
wutwutwat 3y ago
You also let the end users be your uplink speed, your availability, your malware delivery vectors, your customer complaint generators. BT is not a magic bullet, it's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it wasn't giant bandwidth hungry companies like yt and netflix would have been using it 10 years ago, along with every cdn on the planet
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  You can set up a server or two with fast uplinks as users. That raises the floor for bandwidth and availability just fine. The problem with content delivery is not the floor: it's the ceiling. A CDN requires much more than a server or two. Bittorrent does not. With bittorrent, you will never hit the ceiling, because every user that enters the room raises that ceiling for the rest. The only reason that Netflix uses a CDN is copyright. Netflix as a platform fundamentally exists to put DRM between the content creator and the viewer. If the content creators were not interested in wrapping their content in DRM, then they would gladly share it via bittorrent. In fact, Spotify actually started as a P2P network. Once they were big enough, they switched to a CDN so that they could provide the DRM that copyright holders wanted. The rest of your complaints are about moderation, which are also a feature of copyright. Plenty of people would gladly create trackers and forums that curate content the way you want. They don't, because that's illegal. Copyright took the most basic computing fundamental - copying files - and turned it into a black market. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly GPG sign their torrents to eliminate the malware vector. Get rid of copyright, and people will gladly share the original raw copy of a file, or a lossy format that was encoded only once (with proof). Hell, we already had that; except it had to be done in the form of private trackers, because just putting everything on a cheap server (to raise the floor) was too much legal liability; so the floor had to be raised by guaranteeing seeders. Now even that is gone, because the best private trackers (like WhatCD) get taken down by governments, and it's nearly impossible to coordinate a replacement in a black market.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    This sounds a little too familiar to the "IPFS would work as a video service" argument that was so vehemently annihilated. Look, I hate copyright and download my own Fair Use archives of many YouTube videos. I'm the last person who would be ideologically opposed to this. Even still, it should not be surprising why ad-subsidized CDNs are popular. YouTube "won" because it's the only platform out of everything listed that works: - Rights-holders are happy that IP control is monopolized (eg. YouTube movies and music limitations) - Viewers are happy to get something in return for an ad rather than sorting out an arbitrary seeding ratio - Creators are happy that the most technical part of their publishing process is figuring out what "Drag and Drop" means P2P systems like that break, unless you put a CDN in front of them. Once you scale to YouTube-level architecture, P2P doesn't keep scaling except when you control the major peers. At that point, you are so close to building a CDN pipeline that you might as well just do it.

dietr1ch 3y ago

We don't need a cache site, but to be able to have a shared content addressed storage. I wish a single technology is developed for this, and then I don't mind if privates sites act as peers, I'd love to be able to share games I downloaded or videos I recently saw locally. It took Steam like 20yr to support sharing on the local network (with Google/Facebook/Netflix with no sharing in sight). I think that's insane and shows that hardware has been improving too fast in some sense.

lakomen 3y ago
I'd even like to sell off those games. But the mafia, sorry lobby is too strong, to well smeared.
MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
Isn't this what IPFS promised and sorta delivered?

matheusmoreira 3y ago

The bandwidth problem has already been solved by peer to peer file sharing. The only reason this solution is not widely deployed is copyright.