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Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any ki

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc. It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also finding that out. [1] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

jacquesm 3y ago
We did this peer-to-peer but the risks for users became too great for that to be sustainable.
- some_random 3y ago
  What sorts of risks to users were you seeing?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Stalkers figuring out where the women live and then doing housecalls, blackmail, etc. Too many assholes on this planet for a service like that to work in a way that potentially allows for people to be identified.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      And it is only getting easier. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelligence-can-find-your-location-in-photos-worrying-privacy-expert https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38813150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38813150
golergka 3y ago
What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)
  - golergka 3y ago
    > e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place) Actually, the opposite is true. If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix. But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming. In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      > Actually, the opposite is true. It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.
timr 3y ago
I don't know about "Google scale", but you definitely need to be able to peer to get the costs under control. That requires a certain level of investment (on the order of millions of dollars in hardware/datacenter costs), plus the human relationships to get the peering agreements done. Twitch absolutely had that in place, so it's not really fair to compare it to a hobby project and conclude the business model doesn't work. There's absolutely a business, if you have license to good content that people want to see. If you don't, then you're in a horrible commodity market -- you're reselling bandwidth.
- genmud 3y ago
  I feel like free peering is a thing of the past. Verizon/Comcast killed it by forcing people to pay for peering relations about a decade ago.
  - msie 3y ago
    How much of charging for network traffic profit? I imagine a lot.
  - xwolfi 3y ago
    Verizon/Comcast don't even exist here, and I live between India and China, almost half of humanity. Are you talking in hyper-local terms ? Peering exist everywhere, and at scale you have to pay, yes.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Free peering always was just "Hey, I have 10GB of transit to push to you, and you have about the same, let's keep the beancounters out of this." As consumer Internet grew, that became more and more unstable, until Netflix hit and just absolutely overwhelmed it.
    - mnky9800n 3y ago
      In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things. Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and kept going up the chain until the director said just pay the VAT. after countless emails, meetings, and other time wasting activities, VAT ended up being 8 euros. Bean counters create drama to justify their bean counting. I'm sure there are good reasons for them. But they are often simply in the way.
HWR_14 3y ago
How is Amazon not a Google-scale peer?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  The bandwidth was obviously never the problem for Amazon. It was the actual content. How do you monetize Twitch streamers and, more importantly, Twitch stream viewers? They never figured that out, even at Amazon-scale.
  - im_down_w_otp 3y ago
    Force people who want to sell on Amazon Marketplace to dedicate product to and pay for placement within Twitch streams. Then identify those products in the streams and spam the viewers & chat with purchase links and content streams that contain related recommended products. Turn the whole thing into a self-referential product placement & affiliate scheme.
    - Avicebron 3y ago
      Depending on how in in-your-face that is, it might just kill the platform. I don't have any definitive answers but maybe if they ramped up their own game development studios, and flooded the ecosystem with them, they might see some return on investment (people paying for micro transactions basically) that seems like a semi-organic fit for the platform.
      - Sleaker 3y ago
        This seems like it was already part of the plan, see lost ark + new world launches and ongoing prime support.
huytersd 3y ago
I’m sure something like this already exists but can’t there be a distributed streaming platform that pays people fractions of a penny for hosting (all/part) of a video like bitorrent. I’m sure there’s some cryptocurrency equivalent. Or even better some combination of CDNs and distributed bitorrent like streaming. At the very least, it should atleast ease the burden of massive central hosting.
- ansible 3y ago
  That might work for pre-recorded video, but I don't think it would be stable and reliable for live streams.
bjclark 3y ago
I’m the founder and cto of a niche streaming platform. You don’t need to be google scale. You do need a different business model.
- hildegrin19 3y ago
  "Niche" is very different. Lower membership and higher premiums, usually. I don't suppose you'd like to offer anything further about your niche or your membership base, would you?
- Iwan-Zotow 3y ago
  It's Amazon, anything niche is just not registered...
theGnuMe 3y ago
I don't understand why multicast isn't used. I imagine starlink multicast will become a thing and maybe we will all get transceivers. Everything old will becomes new again...
- ssl-3 3y ago
  Multicast on the public Internet has never been much of a thing, and seems unlikely to ever be much of a thing. (Some of us have been dreaming about it becoming reality for decades, but some of us have also given up years ago.)
- panick21_ 3y ago
  The more important question is not why no multicast, but why no torrent style stream where the viewers themselves share with other viewers.

jacquesm 3y ago

We did this peer-to-peer but the risks for users became too great for that to be sustainable.

some_random 3y ago
What sorts of risks to users were you seeing?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Stalkers figuring out where the women live and then doing housecalls, blackmail, etc. Too many assholes on this planet for a service like that to work in a way that potentially allows for people to be identified.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    And it is only getting easier. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelligence-can-find-your-location-in-photos-worrying-privacy-expert https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38813150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38813150

golergka 3y ago

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

justsomehnguy 3y ago
a) you don't waste money on the licensing in the first place b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands EDIT: e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)
- golergka 3y ago
  > e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place) Actually, the opposite is true. If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix. But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming. In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > Actually, the opposite is true. It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.

timr 3y ago

I don't know about "Google scale", but you definitely need to be able to peer to get the costs under control. That requires a certain level of investment (on the order of millions of dollars in hardware/datacenter costs), plus the human relationships to get the peering agreements done. Twitch absolutely had that in place, so it's not really fair to compare it to a hobby project and conclude the business model doesn't work. There's absolutely a business, if you have license to good content that people want to see. If you don't, then you're in a horrible commodity market -- you're reselling bandwidth.

genmud 3y ago
I feel like free peering is a thing of the past. Verizon/Comcast killed it by forcing people to pay for peering relations about a decade ago.
- msie 3y ago
  How much of charging for network traffic profit? I imagine a lot.
- xwolfi 3y ago
  Verizon/Comcast don't even exist here, and I live between India and China, almost half of humanity. Are you talking in hyper-local terms ? Peering exist everywhere, and at scale you have to pay, yes.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Free peering always was just "Hey, I have 10GB of transit to push to you, and you have about the same, let's keep the beancounters out of this." As consumer Internet grew, that became more and more unstable, until Netflix hit and just absolutely overwhelmed it.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    In my experience it's typically a good idea to keep the bean counters out of things. Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and kept going up the chain until the director said just pay the VAT. after countless emails, meetings, and other time wasting activities, VAT ended up being 8 euros. Bean counters create drama to justify their bean counting. I'm sure there are good reasons for them. But they are often simply in the way.

HWR_14 3y ago

How is Amazon not a Google-scale peer?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
The bandwidth was obviously never the problem for Amazon. It was the actual content. How do you monetize Twitch streamers and, more importantly, Twitch stream viewers? They never figured that out, even at Amazon-scale.
- im_down_w_otp 3y ago
  Force people who want to sell on Amazon Marketplace to dedicate product to and pay for placement within Twitch streams. Then identify those products in the streams and spam the viewers & chat with purchase links and content streams that contain related recommended products. Turn the whole thing into a self-referential product placement & affiliate scheme.
  - Avicebron 3y ago
    Depending on how in in-your-face that is, it might just kill the platform. I don't have any definitive answers but maybe if they ramped up their own game development studios, and flooded the ecosystem with them, they might see some return on investment (people paying for micro transactions basically) that seems like a semi-organic fit for the platform.
    - Sleaker 3y ago
      This seems like it was already part of the plan, see lost ark + new world launches and ongoing prime support.

huytersd 3y ago

I’m sure something like this already exists but can’t there be a distributed streaming platform that pays people fractions of a penny for hosting (all/part) of a video like bitorrent. I’m sure there’s some cryptocurrency equivalent. Or even better some combination of CDNs and distributed bitorrent like streaming. At the very least, it should atleast ease the burden of massive central hosting.

ansible 3y ago
That might work for pre-recorded video, but I don't think it would be stable and reliable for live streams.

bjclark 3y ago

I’m the founder and cto of a niche streaming platform. You don’t need to be google scale. You do need a different business model.

hildegrin19 3y ago
"Niche" is very different. Lower membership and higher premiums, usually. I don't suppose you'd like to offer anything further about your niche or your membership base, would you?
Iwan-Zotow 3y ago
It's Amazon, anything niche is just not registered...

theGnuMe 3y ago

I don't understand why multicast isn't used. I imagine starlink multicast will become a thing and maybe we will all get transceivers. Everything old will becomes new again...

ssl-3 3y ago
Multicast on the public Internet has never been much of a thing, and seems unlikely to ever be much of a thing. (Some of us have been dreaming about it becoming reality for decades, but some of us have also given up years ago.)
panick21_ 3y ago
The more important question is not why no multicast, but why no torrent style stream where the viewers themselves share with other viewers.