6 ms·

The business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible rather than unlikely at scale.

by jamespo 11y ago

thatcat 11y ago
>business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible at scale And yet it's existed for years using p2p/torrents. So they're more like business fictions
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Do you feel you made a point by listing services that exist only by breaking the law to exist as somehow related to business reality? Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable. The only way you have a point is to be rampantly intellectually dishonest, or ignorant of reality. Neither option is great, so charitably, it's best to assume you know this stuff and you're just trolling. Also not great. Do you have a 4th option?
  - cousin_it 11y ago
    I think grandparent just wished to say that "direct, free, downloadable videos" are technologically possible at large scale via p2p. Mentioning copyright is a bit off topic. It's possible to create a paid p2p service for video, and have tons of viewers without spending millions on infrastructure. Hence the bit about "business fictions".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - drostie 11y ago
    The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. The "4th option" is that you've got the causality completely backwards in your head: it just happens to be the case that the cultures where distributed tooling became important were the ones where it was necessary to promote an "all information is free" mindset, not that it's necessarily a part of distributed tooling that you take that mindset. If we start with a centralized metadata server/peer tracker, a set of "base seeds" to keep videos alive, and a commenting system, we can still revoke access to individual videos (our app will simply not support peer discovery except through our tracker, we take down the seeds, comments, and tracker entry on a revocation) while distributing bandwidth for the viral videos that need it. The point is germane.
    - ucaetano 11y ago
      > The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID. Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done.
      - thatcat 11y ago
        >imagine having to install a plethora of apps on everydevice... Well, I don't have to imagine this because Youtube and Netflix both make you install apps. Flash and silverlight. You can opt-into the html5 streaming on yt, but that's still a change you have to make.
      - drostie 11y ago
        > Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID. Sorry, there is some ambiguity in English about this. I am regarding a "solved problem" as a "problem" (i.e. classification) whereas you are regarding it as "no longer a problem" (i.e. interface). Yes, right now YouTube's interaction with the problem is highly limited (though not nonexistent), but if one is, say, trying to disrupt YouTube or talk about YouTube's history, one still classifies it as a problem in general that exists within YouTube's problem domain. > Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done. I mean, I agree that it helps that particular problem somewhat to have a cross-platform virtual machine (the browser) and to distribute an executable (your JS app) on that machine rather than (or sometimes alongside) your content. This also creates its own problems, of course, like simpler browsers (spiders, text-only browsers) not being compatible with your website, as well as some new buggy issues when, say, the JS doesn't load properly. But HTML+CSS+JS is not new in this town and the cemetery has some gravestones -- like the fact that there aren't many desktop Java applications, the complete failure of the Java browser plugin, and the waning of the Flash plugin. It is peculiar among these only because its dreams are less lofty: not "write once run everywhere" but "write once, then write a (hopefully graceful) downgrade path if they do not support the features that I want to use."
  - thatcat 11y ago
    >Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable Well said, you should tell this to Disney, MPAA, and MAFIAA so they'll stop trampling the rights of the commons by extending the length of copyrights everytime something profitable to them is about to expire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
- s73v3r 11y ago
  I wouldn't use that as any evidence for business reality, considering most of them have none of the pressures of actual business to consider.

The business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible rather than unlikely at scale.

by jamespo 11y ago

The business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible rather than unlikely at scale.

>business realities make direct, free, downloadable videos impossible at scale And yet it's existed for years using p2p/torrents. So they're more like business fictions

oldmanjay 11y ago
Do you feel you made a point by listing services that exist only by breaking the law to exist as somehow related to business reality? Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable. The only way you have a point is to be rampantly intellectually dishonest, or ignorant of reality. Neither option is great, so charitably, it's best to assume you know this stuff and you're just trolling. Also not great. Do you have a 4th option?
- cousin_it 11y ago
  I think grandparent just wished to say that "direct, free, downloadable videos" are technologically possible at large scale via p2p. Mentioning copyright is a bit off topic. It's possible to create a paid p2p service for video, and have tons of viewers without spending millions on infrastructure. Hence the bit about "business fictions".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- drostie 11y ago
  The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. The "4th option" is that you've got the causality completely backwards in your head: it just happens to be the case that the cultures where distributed tooling became important were the ones where it was necessary to promote an "all information is free" mindset, not that it's necessarily a part of distributed tooling that you take that mindset. If we start with a centralized metadata server/peer tracker, a set of "base seeds" to keep videos alive, and a commenting system, we can still revoke access to individual videos (our app will simply not support peer discovery except through our tracker, we take down the seeds, comments, and tracker entry on a revocation) while distributing bandwidth for the viral videos that need it. The point is germane.
  - ucaetano 11y ago
    > The violation of IP is a similar problem for torrents and YouTube alike. Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID. Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done.
    - thatcat 11y ago
      >imagine having to install a plethora of apps on everydevice... Well, I don't have to imagine this because Youtube and Netflix both make you install apps. Flash and silverlight. You can opt-into the html5 streaming on yt, but that's still a change you have to make.
    - drostie 11y ago
      > Not at all, YT solved it many years ago with ContentID. Sorry, there is some ambiguity in English about this. I am regarding a "solved problem" as a "problem" (i.e. classification) whereas you are regarding it as "no longer a problem" (i.e. interface). Yes, right now YouTube's interaction with the problem is highly limited (though not nonexistent), but if one is, say, trying to disrupt YouTube or talk about YouTube's history, one still classifies it as a problem in general that exists within YouTube's problem domain. > Now imagine having to install all the plethora of apps on every device, one for videos, one for music, 500 for different types of documents, etc. Instead, you install a (hopefully) standard-compliant browser, and done. I mean, I agree that it helps that particular problem somewhat to have a cross-platform virtual machine (the browser) and to distribute an executable (your JS app) on that machine rather than (or sometimes alongside) your content. This also creates its own problems, of course, like simpler browsers (spiders, text-only browsers) not being compatible with your website, as well as some new buggy issues when, say, the JS doesn't load properly. But HTML+CSS+JS is not new in this town and the cemetery has some gravestones -- like the fact that there aren't many desktop Java applications, the complete failure of the Java browser plugin, and the waning of the Flash plugin. It is peculiar among these only because its dreams are less lofty: not "write once run everywhere" but "write once, then write a (hopefully graceful) downgrade path if they do not support the features that I want to use."
- thatcat 11y ago
  >Making your money by trampling the rights of others isn't exactly sustainable Well said, you should tell this to Disney, MPAA, and MAFIAA so they'll stop trampling the rights of the commons by extending the length of copyrights everytime something profitable to them is about to expire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
s73v3r 11y ago
I wouldn't use that as any evidence for business reality, considering most of them have none of the pressures of actual business to consider.