A comment from @disrooter from another thread;https://lemmy.ml/post/57418/comment/42932
"As someone who managed a PeerTube instance for a large YouTube channel I have to say the big problem is storage: how are you going to pay for storage that increases with each new video while the income is mostly the same? From a business point of view it’s a suicide.
Keep in mind content creators on YouTube produce many gigabytes/week. In a few years they would have to pay hundreds of dollars each week, even when they pause and not producing any new video, when they are getting less donations and so on.
Why should they invest so much money in a PeerTube instance? Only a premium pay-to-view service can justify it and you really need a high cost-to-produce-and-stream-the-video/minutes-of-video ratio to make it convenient, for example documentaries and not lazy records of hours of online debates." -end quote
This means that if avid content creators wants to host a peertube instance, they will be held back from doing it, because of how expensive it will be.
Just wanna talk about this issue, it deserves It’s own post. let me know what you think.
You would need to look into economic and business models of decentralized platforms to find out what would best fit for peertube. If YouTube’s business model is based on their ability to collect data from users in a centralized space and sell that in the form of advertising, to mimic that model you would need a system to distribute revenue in a decentralized way. Similar to an electric smart grid, think of data flows in the same way and power flows. I can’t think of a model besides that that would allow decentralized video to scale to the level of Youtube. Maybe a platform co-op model where everyone pays a subscription to maintain the servers, and to incentivize creators a pool of revenue is distributed based on view counts, while still allowing for donation buttons on user pages.
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I mean, this discussion is really kind of the centralized platform vs. self-hosted discussion.
And I don’t think there is a good answer. Self-hosting is expensive. But putting all of your eggs into one basket can also get really expensive, when Mr. Centralized Platform decides to kick you out. (Or lets some shitty bots and media corporations decide for them.)
Ultimately, most content creators will not suddenly migrate off of YouTube, but I don’t think that should be the goal.
To me, PeerTube would already be very successful when I can get enough video entertainment without needing to use YouTube, Twitch etc…rather than migrating, I prefer to just incentivize content creators to also make their content available in the fediverse.
great point. I created an account out curiosity on a random instance and it allowed me to upload 2 or 3 vids.
Looking at digitalocean as an example it seems like one could get by on 50-100 a month.
This might be a good opportunity for one of the altruistic organisations to make peertube hosting affordable. Someone like Mozilla but with more free cash flow.
I had the same idea before, this is what I suggested; https://lemmy.ml/post/57418/comment/43067 the only thing we need is someone interested to make a video-streaming datacenter.
This might be a good opportunity for one of the altruistic organisations to make peertube hosting affordable. Someone like Mozilla but with more free cash flow.
definitely.
Kind of makes you wonder why google is willing to front the bill for all of data unless they are getting something valuable out of it.
companies do get a little spooky sometimes
I think initially YouTube operated at a significant loss, and might even still be doing so. They will of course benefit massively from the efficiencies of scale
The main reason why YouTube Creators are not coming to Peertube is as simple as Money. It is not worth it. They may be fine without earnings from YouTube, but I dont think Sponsors will pay the same if their videos are on Peertube.
but I dont think Sponsors will pay the same if their videos are on Peertube.
why? can you elaborate?
Sponsors’ pay depends on the number of views a particular creator gets on an average. Most of the time their contract will specify the number of views required for the payment. YouTube have huge number of users compared to Peertube and thus less views than YouTube. So they wont be getting the same money as they get when on Youtube. So, why move.
I never told anyone to move, rather I told people to ask them to also host it on peertube so it will be available on the fediverse. that’s why it doesn’t make sense to me that you’ve said that.
That I think a lot of people have started doing. Hopefully the numbers will increase. I think there is a crossposting service between Peertube and YouTube.
There is, PeerTube developers also provide a script that can import an entire YouTube channel to PeerTube, metadata like description included. The script can be run locally on your PC or on the PeerTube server if you are the admin. The script can also import the videos from a certain date to another one. It doesn’t duplicate the videos, so if you set it to run automatically once in a while it will just import new videos.
A couple of more popular channels started offering their videos in podcast format, I am thinking of CGP Crey and MinutePhysics. It would be interesting to know how many views (or downloads as I think that’s how it’s calculated) they got on that. As it’s possible to get PeerTube videos via RSS then it could be possible to set up their own instance. I wonder what the difference is for costs or views in that sense.
Actually there are instances like peertube.su that allow unlimited uploading quota
I think the problem here is about storage and the business model of a decentralized video hosting
yeah that instance offers unlimited storage
One solution is making videos low res. Not everything needs to be 4K afterall, in my experience 480p is pretty good enough under most circumstances. Issue is not many people are willing to do that. And besides there is still transcoding to worry about. It is a very difficult problem to tackle indeed.
From my experience tell to a video maker they can’t use 1080p or 720p but have to stuck to 480p and they will never want to talk about PeerTube anymore.
Like I said most people aren’t willing to do that.
Hmm first thoughts include, if you aren’t uploading on Youtube at all, make your videos shorter. I think videos have gotten as long as they have because of YT policy? I could be wrong, but shorter videos without cutting out in video sponsers.
I also think it depends on the channel. As a gamer channel, it might make sense to put more of your eggs in the Owncast/streaming basket so to speak and only upload moments deserving of video, like a highlight reel to bring it to awareness and then get the cash from streaming.
Third, this would be an excellent time to review old videos and get rid of the ones you don’t want anymore. Of course, this could backfire in the sense that someone else will potentially upload the video, but again, content creators on Peertube should not be relying on advertisement to get their money. Or at least, advertising as we know.
Also, perhaps there is a better way to upload to help limit the space it takes up? Exchange quality back down to what it was before until tech catches up in a couple years and we can experience 1080p again. I had a younger cousin show me a video and the quality dropped slightly and cousin apologized for the bad quality. I’m like bro, You know NOTHING of bad quality videos. The youth are so spoiled /s
My initial thoughts, take it with a grain of sand since I don’t care for people who try to make a living off entertainment. I provide and recieve my entertainment for free and can’t recall the last time I actually followed a creator on YouTube.
The problem here is not only maximizing content-quality over minutes-of-video ratio.
The problem is that the storage and its cost always increase over time while the income could be high but doesn’t increase accordingly.
Depending on how many followers you have and the optimization you make on duration the moment you will start losing money will be just removed. Maybe two years instead of one year? But that moment will come.
Mathematically, they are two time-dependent curves that will necessarily intersect at a certain point.
As I said in the original thread, the only solution I can think of is making content creators able to download old videos nobody watch, mark them as archived and if some users requests them the authors can decide to reupload them. In addition to this it should be possible for anyone with a seedbox for torrents to make old videos still available even if the server have not the files anymore, but huge work on PeerTube would be needed to allow the latter.
*not “removed” but “removed”, stupid auto-correction.
Ha, it’s Lemmy slur filter, it does replace “r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d” with “removed”.
This is way I often said this slur filter is a dumb idea.
*why
they should just get rid of racial slurs
to each own opinions I guess. the content creator I watch are mostly useful informations for me, and most of them are already on peertube, because they’re based.
I’ll take it with a grain of salt, though video content is a trend that will likely not go away, so at least we should make a usable platform that’s not a corporate media company.
first point
shorter videos will be more frequent, but I doubt people are just gonna make just 3 minute videos. different kind of creator, different lengths.
second point
Peertube as an alternative twitch platform? Huh. never thought of it. imagine peertube having superchat lol.
third point
I agree on this, some creators have too much content that are useless. (except for gaming. well, don’t make me explain it.)
fourth point
you’re a boomer lol. /s otherwise, it could help. then again that’s for other people to choose. unlikely that people want lower quality vids.
afaik Peertube also uses BitTorrent. anyone watching a video automatically downloads from and seeds to other people watching the same video. idk exactly how this would factor into the economics, but a high-traffic Peertube instance would definitely be cheaper than other video hosting softwarei seem to have misunderstood the post; i thought it was about bandwidththere is already unmetered bandwith VPS providers, so that isn’t really much of a problem in the first place. the bigger problem here is with hosting expenses for renting storage.
That’s great for bandwidth and makes you able to serve a decent stream with a basic server but the problem of storage remains. Other Fediverse services like Mastodon have not this issue because video files use much more storage.
