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Video tutorials now on PeerTube

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Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#91

Post by ssivark »

duxup wrote: post #7

I wonder at what point we as internet users will decide that we're willing to pay for services in order to maintain more control? In the meantime I sympathize with folks who in a way have ground rules changed on them, but then again were using a free service where they were the product... The internet is a weird place where we demand everything be free as just a baseline rule, and then complain when the product that…

Torrents seem like the ideal solution for something like this? The infrastructure cost of hosting is shared by all those who find the content valuable. It also has a natural cache-like behavior where popular content will be highly seeded, while unpopular content drops out.

Interestingly, Peertube seems to be backed by exactly such infrastructure.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#92

Post by EugeneG »

rchaud wrote: post #88
TheChaplain wrote: post #48

I understand and a sympathize with his opinion, at the same time the platform must be financed somehow, no? Yeah I know Google are rich but still, from a technical standpoint YT is pretty damn good. I've never had any issues watching videos or streaming, and instantly served in EU, Asia and the US. For that and the massive selection of content I'd say it's worth it for me.

Yes, the platform must be financed somehow. However, that 'somehow' didn't seem to be an issue for 15 years. A video series about parametric 2d/3d CAD is not going to do Logan Paul numbers, so what merit is there to jam ads into it anyway?

Don’t like them, don’t watch/upload. Just like he did. They can put in as many ads as they want, and those who are bothered can refuse to watch.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#93

Post by api »

ghaff wrote: post #54
api wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. You can also get 2-4X the compute and RAM for pennies (comparatively). If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these f…

S3 can make sense for lightweight hosting of media files. I pay less than I would for a VPS. That said, if I were starting from scratch, I'd probably use Backblaze B2 because I believe they let you set hard quotas. But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.

I think you can set quotas on S3 somehow too.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#94

Post by rvz »

dilap wrote: post #41

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI ) YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable. How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused…

He made the right choice there. It's not fit for purpose for small creators or users anymore and the big established media players have spoilt it for them.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'.

For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis.

One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/about/

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#95

Post by fouric »

ghaff wrote: post #35
abacadaba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments. there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.

Clay Shirky wrote a couple of decades ago about the problem of mental transaction costs associated with paying a few cents to read an article or consume some other sort of media. I still tend to agree with that. If it were just a technology or network effect problem, I have to believe it would have been solved given how many media payment issues could in principle be solved by micropayments.

I don't buy this argument, for a couple of reasons.

First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand.

Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway.

Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this.

Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc).

I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution.

EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#96

Post by SQueeeeeL »

ghaff wrote: post #83
dilap wrote: post #41

Andrew Kelley of Zig also moved away from YouTube because of forced ads ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjz6xNO63mI ) YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable. How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused…

Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.

Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#97

Post by ghaff »

bluescrn wrote: post #76
Filligree wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There once was such a system —Google Contributor. It was supposed to be expanded into a full micropayment system once there was a baseline market activity to set the prices by, using the price of ads to bootstrap. It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.

Nobody has managed micropayments that are actually micro. Even F2P games rarely allow you to spend less than about $1 at a time - it's all about chasing whales who'll spend $99.99 repeatedly... In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads. The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' but…

For charging just a few cents to work, it would have to be normed across a wide range of media to the degree that a meter just transparently clicked against a payment balance in essentially the same manner as turning on a faucet or a light switch. And that's a really high bar in an online world where people are used to either free or a relative handful of all-you-can-eat subscription services that cost enough that people sign up for them fairly deliberately.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#98

Post by eropple »

phkahler wrote: post #81
eropple wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video is the sort of thing that benefits significantly from economies of scale. Encoding and bandwidth costs are your two biggest factors. Encoding has to be done once -- well, once per rendition you ship, more on that in a second -- but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very linear , and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item. Those bandwidth costs typically depend on your desired quality of video (bi…

>> but bandwidth costs are, modulo volume discounts, very linear, and thus a direct per-viewer-minute line item We need something like bit torrent for video, where the peers send chunks biased toward the beginning of the video. This would spread the bandwidth costs to the viewers. Sure, the main site might be constantly streaming 1 or 2 full streams, but that can be fairly low bandwidth.

It's possible. I have my doubts, for a few reasons; as with most technical challenges, it's a deeper problem than most people realize.

1) Orchestration of this is not trivial, and creates new points of centralization. Who runs your moral equivalent of a tracker/DHT? How do they keep the lights on for your relatively niche video? There are social differences between the infrastructural audiences of BitTorrent and a hypothetical general-purpose video tracker. If the idea is that everyone runs their own, you're getting into latency-sensitive problems of coordination (and given the push towards static sites, make me ask "do we expect people to have the capacity to do this?") that strike me as tricky given the requirements of video streaming.

2) This assumes that clients are both willing and able to do peer-to-peer transfers. I wouldn't bet on it.

3) This assumes that clients keep old chunks around for the purpose of peer-to-peer transfers (and don't evict things when under memory/storage pressure) and adequately update the tracker with what it has available at all times. I wouldn't bet on that being a reasonable assumption.

4) This assumes clients are reliable and have reliable upload. If you don't get a chunk from that peer client fast enough or that client disappears before you can handshake with another one and get that chunk, you have a video drop. Video drops are a game-over condition in 2021. Which probably seems unfair to say, but something like this has to present a better solution for clients, not for content providers, and this strikes me as really not viable for clients. Otherwise, people leave.

Video is really, really hard. It wasn't until I built a pipeline myself (not a fancy one, either) that I realized how nasty it was. Slinging huge amounts of data around with stiff latency requirements seems to lend itself to more vertical scaling than this approach suggests.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#99

Post by RandallBrown »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #96
ghaff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.

Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it

I've been paying for YouTube Premium for a few months now and absolutely love it. If I ever get logged out it's a horrible reminder of how annoying the ads are.

Re: Video tutorials now on PeerTube

#100

Post by ghaff »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #96
ghaff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers need to be able and willing to pay money rather than renting their eyeballs. (And creators need to be willing to pay for hosting/discovery.) If YouTube could make more money as a gated subscription site that charged for uploads and, say, $100/year to access, they'd be more than happy to do so.

Wait, isn't YouTube premium this and basically no one uses it

That's sort of my point. You could also look at Vimeo vs. YouTube.

There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.

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