Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 376 posts

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#161

Post by ktallett »

djaro wrote: post #70
ktallett wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and…

It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos. High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual b…

High quality doesn't just mean production values, it can relate to any aspect of the video. High quality could simply reflect the quality of content. I would much prefer if PeerTube became a far easier to browse version of Archive along with creators producing items of creative and knowledge value. We don't need to replace YouTube as it likely can't be replaced. However switching a significant number away with a different approach to what is hosted there would be a positive.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#162

Post by dinkleberg »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #153
dinkleberg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.

> Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. ...because they're directly tied to YouTube own revenue. As someone who creates a fair bit of content, and am fortunate enough not to have to worry about the revenue from that, I deliberately try to minimize monetization because it ultimately becomes the main driving force behind your content creation. Monetization as the only model for content creation lead…

No, it is because that is the content that people want to watch. I too create content that has been widely watched and don't include video ads or any of the other monetization features they push. But I create videos because I want people to watch them. I don't do it for the sake of myself and pushing it out into the void. I don't follow whatever the trends are, I create what I believe will be the most useful as I make educational content. And it works. But I post to YouTube because that is where people will find it.

If I were to self-host my videos or put it on PeerTube if I wanted anyone to see it I would actively have to go out and promote it myself. YouTube does that for me.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#163

Post by ibejoeb »

mywittyname wrote: post #57
infamia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many…

Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market. Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them. The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a t…

> Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos

Unfortunately, I agree. It's not the algorithm for me, though. Rather, it's the capabilities of the platform. I use the cast feature almost exclusively. I rarely watch a video on a computer screen and never on a mobile device. YouTube's casting feature is constantly broken, but it's the only thing that even barely works. I have no idea how many others see it this way, but I don't think I'm particularly distinct.

I've been following https://github.com/futo-org/fcast for a bit, but it doesn't really have a viable receiver implementation that I know of.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#164

Post by cyberax »

djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

Would you mirror your videos to something like Peertube if it included automated pay-per-view (via something like x402 API)?

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#165

Post by Ferret7446 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #148
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says "at least"... on many channels there's videos with just a few views and videos with tons of views with much more than 10x difference

That's fair, Google admitted in the DoJ trial where it was convicted of being a monopolist that the revenues that it paid out were roughly 10% of the revenues it collected. If you have fewer than a requisite number of subscribers they keep 100% of the monetization proceeds. I was simply struck by the parallels between the way YouTube has grown up and how the whole movie industry grew up.

Because Google is losing money for those videos, they're collecting 100% of the revenue and shouldering 100% of the costs and 100% of the net loss. Perhaps they should split the net loss 50-50 with those users, but then no one would use YouTube.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#166

Post by lanthissa »

djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another company willing to eat a loss for a long time. The issue with eating hte loss, is video is a pretty painful loss to eat compared to text, so why not go into every text market first for places like meta.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#167

Post by alex1138 »

lanthissa wrote: post #166
djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another compan…

Great deal except when you get demonetized for partisan reasons

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#168

Post by lanthissa »

infamia wrote: post #48
djaro wrote: post #41

As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization. I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor. I have a pretty small…

You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many…

long term he doesn't want his own distribution though. youtube offers you new viewers constantly. peertube only makes sense if it has a viewerbase and an ad network, and at hte point we're back to google but they're going to pay more since they have a larger user base and more ads which means their monetization rate is going to be much higher.

disrupting youtube is super hard, you basically need to bring your own audience from something else to do it, or have a platform already existing that you expand into the us.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#169

Post by carlosjobim »

alex1138 wrote: post #167
lanthissa wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is exactly right, people dont realize that they're getting a great deal on youtube. if you want to disrupt youtube you need to do it by winning over the creators which is a difficult thing to do since no new platform can subsidize to the scale of what youtube offers already due to its size, the only ones who really could are meta since they have the ad network and users already to funnel to it, or another compan…

Great deal except when you get demonetized for partisan reasons

Sure, but compare that to all other television and streaming services, where all independent creators are demonetized and banned by default. If you don't have the right contacts you're not allowed to put your video on Netflix.
Post reply on HN