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PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

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Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#41

I think for this to be successful you need to encourage users to server the videos. There are a couple things that might help this: - Popularity could be based not only on views, but how many total minutes of the video were shared by other people. - When someone watches a video, they have to keep hosting it until they share as much as they've watched it (so if they watched 10 minutes, they have to share it until they…

In my current model for a distributed video service, peers gain "premium" bandwidth rights in exchange for storing videos, modulated by view count.

Plenty of users would store popular videos to chase after premiums, but it will be similarly profitable for a handful or so of people to host the less popular videos because there will be less competition for views (which are in turn modulated by the amount of data for a video you contributed to a given P2P stream).

This solves the problem of obscure but useful content being phased out.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#42

Problem is being able to monetize.

That's probably the most critical aspect of any YouTube replacement.

People idealize about a free-as-in-beer video platform but at the end of the day, those don't pay for quality content to be produced. The YouTube of today can only exist with proper income generation.

I have worked through some interesting models for a P2P video platform and a few ideas on how to actually go about implementing advertisements, but I have yet to come up with a solid way of convincing advertisers to play ball on videos whose content they don't like.

Currently experimenting with the idea of having two tiers of advertising, a cheap and "premium" tier, and only the premium tier allows you to be selective about which videos your ads run on. The cheap tier videos would have a chance of playing on "premium" (high-engagement) content, but would generally play on "regular" content.

The problem is this system still wouldn't likely wouldn't result in a worthwhile payout for more "controversial" producers even if it protects semi-popular non-leftist producers, so an integrated "Patreon"-style donation-subscription service might be something worth exploring.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#43
post #12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

D.tube works just fine: https://d.tube/

D.tube makes the browser download from a gateway (ipfs.io) using HTTP.

That's true! But nothing is stopping them from putting in js-ipfs into dtube and leveraging everyone who is watching the videos to help host them as well.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#44

awesome, except it doesn't look like there are any incentives to running a server. unless i missed something?

Like Mastodon et al, this doesn't need to be built on traditional incentives. The incentives are that you want to share cool videos with people. Any one server that gets overloaded with users encourages others to host another server and build a community on it, and the load (and the cost) naturally balances and is distributed across the whole network.

Definitely an interesting digital ecosystem experiment. Hopefully it can sustain itself. Will be interesting to see how it plays out and evolves.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#45

Problem is being able to monetize.

There is no monetization concern here, the project is sponsored by Framasoft, a French non-profit organization who wants to provide free-software alternatives to services owned by big corporations.

Free is a loaded term.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#46
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make them share for ~10% longer than they consumed for a more robust network.

Most people have terrible upload speeds compared to download speeds. In my neighborhood most people (by choice because they aren't tech savy and don't care) have AT&T DSL with 40Mbps download but 2Mbps upload. This means that for a good quality 10 minute video at 720p with a bitrate of 3mbps they would have to seed for significantly longer than viewing just to get a ratio of 1 without degrading downstream performance…

Just to add a datapoint to this, my home service is gigabit down... 10 megabit up.

That's 1000 / 10.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have terrible upload speeds compared to download speeds. In my neighborhood most people (by choice because they aren't tech savy and don't care) have AT&T DSL with 40Mbps download but 2Mbps upload. This means that for a good quality 10 minute video at 720p with a bitrate of 3mbps they would have to seed for significantly longer than viewing just to get a ratio of 1 without degrading downstream performance…

Just to add a datapoint to this, my home service is gigabit down... 10 megabit up. That's 1000 / 10.

This makes me want to go test me upload on my gigabit down connection...

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#48

Problem is being able to monetize.

Monetise what? For whom? The thing is distributed, it's not like the host has to shoulder most of the bandwidth costs. If one wants to live off their videos, that's another problem, but most videos don't mean to be monetised at all —no ads, no Patreon, no nothing.

They can just use Patreon in exactly the same way they do for YouTube.

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#49
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that, you cannot

Yes, you can. Please try to make sure the information you write is correct. Quick look at the repository I linked above would have made this clear.

What part of the repository says this? I'm having trouble imaginging how it would work, unless the mainstream IPFS network now supports WebRTC?

Re: PeerTube – Federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in the browser

#50

I think for this to be successful you need to encourage users to server the videos. There are a couple things that might help this: - Popularity could be based not only on views, but how many total minutes of the video were shared by other people. - When someone watches a video, they have to keep hosting it until they share as much as they've watched it (so if they watched 10 minutes, they have to share it until they…

An idea of been playing with in my head is a youtube-in-a-box" type device, a machine you would buy that would sit on your home network, essentially a NAS that could publish to video sites or services like peertube. With that sort of device any unused space and bandwidth could be allocated for sharing the videos of others.
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