If Youtubes ad revenue were negligible to the value proposition of the platform they would not be profitable and they would not give away the service for free.
> I just don't see how you get 24/7, 4k streaming without it being monetised by a centralized corp
For popular video, the cost center is bandwidth, not storage. In that case, webtorrent and ipfs are both capable answers - as long as you can overcome the initial viewership bandwidth early viewers of most online video are power users that will stay around and can be used to seed said video to the broader audience, and as the popularity wanes its likely user availability to act as seeders would also wane.
For unpopular video - esoteric, niche media - I don't think there is a good distributed answer. You want to use something like filecoin as a distributed incentivized data store but it isn't browser compatible. And nobody can come close to guaranteeing the availability of any video anyone wants to upload without resources like what Youtube has.
I guess theoretically you could have a distributed ecosystem of video hosts, akin to filecoin, but where members that have videos required act as http servers to serve the video directly. No central authority would host the video, and the actual host could be compesated by the relaying party. Of course then you are just making a really complicated bureaucratic way to effectively rent rackspace, but it would be at least a distributed one.
But at least half the Youtube centralization problem is solved, and as I demonstrated there are interesting ways to approach the later.
Of course all of these have the problem that western copyright is wholly incompatible with how digital information transfer operates, but thats a larger problem than online video, and its not really a problem you can solve with a technical solution besides repeatedly demonstrating the obsolescence and social / economic harm of the incumbent copyright regime.
> If Youtubes ad revenue were negligible to the value proposition of the platform they would not be profitable and they would not give away the service.
Well, it is neglibie. Youtube has never been reported to be a profitable business. The last time its finances were reported a few years back it was basically ‘break even’.
Would that decentralised idea work? Seems pretty cool.
Check out DTube (https://d.tube/) - it's effectively a decentralized YouTube built on IPFS. It's built on Steem to incentivize video uploading/engagement (https://about.d.tube/)
Theres also peertube, but with dtube particularly there are two major problems:
1) Steem in general is a mess. Its controlled by the parent company, you cannot mine it - the only way to generate it is on their content platforms. Its only a cryptocurrency insofar as it has public transaction records, without distributed proofing the integrity of the blockchain is faith in Steemit. Likewise, the value of the currency can solely be attributed to how the public perceives the value of a Steem token. Thats like every crypto, but most cryptos are trusted by their distribution of work, time, space, or stake. For Steem, its about the popularity of Steemit websites.
2) Using IPFS for the video hosting is what I'm advocating for but nothing addresses the second. D.tube simply centralizes on the site and depends on the valuation of the cryptocurrency keeping the lights on when guaranteeing an available seed of every video on the site. If you host your own d.tube instance, you would need to seed every video uploaded lest risk videos being lost.
Additionally, to my knowledge, getting money out of Steem is quite challenging since there is no corporate business account on Steemits end. You have to use third party wallets and exchanges to sell Steem. Good luck trying to onboard normal people into something like that.
That all being said I don't think D.tube is bad. Its a very novel approach to trying to bootstrap a video site by trying to incentivize participation with a deterministic token given out on popularity. But that depends on constant, sufficient growth to keep the hype going so the token isn't arbitraged down to nothing in value. Its only worth anything for its scarcity determinism, which isn't worth much in an endless sea of cryptocurrencies.
> I just don't see how you get 24/7, 4k streaming without it being monetised by a centralized corp
For popular video, the cost center is bandwidth, not storage. In that case, webtorrent and ipfs are both capable answers - as long as you can overcome the initial viewership bandwidth early viewers of most online video are power users that will stay around and can be used to seed said video to the broader audience, and as the popularity wanes its likely user availability to act as seeders would also wane.
For unpopular video - esoteric, niche media - I don't think there is a good distributed answer. You want to use something like filecoin as a distributed incentivized data store but it isn't browser compatible. And nobody can come close to guaranteeing the availability of any video anyone wants to upload without resources like what Youtube has.
I guess theoretically you could have a distributed ecosystem of video hosts, akin to filecoin, but where members that have videos required act as http servers to serve the video directly. No central authority would host the video, and the actual host could be compesated by the relaying party. Of course then you are just making a really complicated bureaucratic way to effectively rent rackspace, but it would be at least a distributed one.
But at least half the Youtube centralization problem is solved, and as I demonstrated there are interesting ways to approach the later.
Of course all of these have the problem that western copyright is wholly incompatible with how digital information transfer operates, but thats a larger problem than online video, and its not really a problem you can solve with a technical solution besides repeatedly demonstrating the obsolescence and social / economic harm of the incumbent copyright regime.