this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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PeerTube will not replace youtube. it cannot compete in either scale or creator compensation.
i don’t think people realize just how insane your infrastructure has to be to handle 30,000 hours of video being uploaded every hour.
Taking some simple napkin math, I have a 1min 1080p video downloaded from YT. It clocks in at 15MB.
So, Gamer's Nexus has 2.6k videos. (That's insane, btw, but fairly large channel, not even LTT size though).
Assuming just 1080p, and let's say about 10min average per video. (Some are less, some are 40+), that's 150MB per 10min video, and that means it's 390,000Mb (or 380.86GB) for their collection. Assuming I'm wrong and the average is even half of that, and the average GN video is only 5 minutes that's still 190GB. And that isn't counting 4k, or the multiple other formats to optimize streaming (720, 480, 360, misc bitrates, etc)
And that's just storage, not even taking into account compute! (Or egress, or transcriptions, or scaling, or..)
Really for something like Peertube to take off it will require each channel to spin up their own instance, which honestly is just another expense for them, one that Youtube does for them for free, plus Youtube offers to pay them. Which, would cut down on some of the chaff (only people who want to do it would do it), but yeah, I don't think it's going to replace YT at any point. Smaller channels can combine for sure, but there is definitely a threshold where it becomes extremely costly.
I'm all for the fediverse, but video streaming is freaking costly and expensive. There's definitely a reason youtube has a monopoly on it. Now this isn't to discourage, but more for anyone who may be thinking "yeah why doesn't peertube just replace it?)
It could be done if peertube used a scheme like BitTorrent. We are approaching a time where enough users have sufficient upstream bandwidth for video.
But then, even without hosting costs, creating videos takes much more time and effort than writing a short text.
Peertube does allow downloading from peers like bittorrent. But you still need to host the whole video, it only would alleviate data transfer. And I don't think you'd want to not host the video and rely entirely on people sharing your video and continuing to seed it for it to be available. So for running a channel or sharing videos that you have produced you will still need to host the files somewhere.
This is something PeerTube already does. Viewers of a video will be a peer and so can other PeerTube servers also be for each others videos.
Bandwidth isn’t the biggest issue. Storage is. The video need to be stored somewhere and storage is expensive.
We need something like Siacoin, that’s easy to use and easy to donate or sell cheap storage.
Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.
In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.
not a word.
A long time ago I read a paper how to mitigate this. Without remembering the details, the idea was: 1. One peer never holds a complete file, only parts of it. 2. You need a key to find all parts of the file and get them in the right order. So Disney can only accuse you of having an incomplete and unusable part of their movie.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
The concept is that will only happen if you have watched that video depicting sexual abuse, because your peertube client (the website) won't download videos you didn't watch.
I was thinking of a hypothetical system were peers provide storage for creators independently of what they are watching (in response to 'videos take too much storage for individuals to host' comment. For peertube, you are right.
That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can "proof" that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.
'Landgericht Hamburg' proofing will be hard, admittedly. But doesn't BT just split up a file in x parts, so each part is watchable? What if you sliced differently, like every 100th byte of a file? Or even bitwise slicing? Not one 600 s snippet but 60000 10 ms snippets from throughout the movie.
That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.