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Used VPN for cheaper YouTube Premium? Congrats, your subscription has been canceled
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Yeah...
How often do images "not load" when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.
Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive...).
And it is why the various "youtube alternatives" like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don't have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.
And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.
What types of games are listen heavy?
A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.
If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people's internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.
I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work... Are torrents. Don't know if PeerTube works that way, but if you're allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you're gonna run into problems sooner or later.
Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.
Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.
And it also doesn't work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but... it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM "for the lolz"
Oh, I know the experience pretty well. The fun fun fun of having something stuck at 98% for a week or more :D
I was thinking, if the creator themselves would seed their stuff it could work - although I admit it'd have to have some kind of seed schedule and maybe some heuristic to see which videos were still available or not. There'd be problems with bandwidth, but I think it would at least allow a decentralised video network to exist, even if it would feel a bit more like watching anime in year 2010.
And yeah, fair point. I don't really do live streams so I didn't think about them. Honestly don't know what a solution for that even could be, in terms of "everyone hosts a little bit to spread the load and price".
Don't really think it'd be that big of a mess for premiers, but then again I don't see a big issue in waiting a day to get good content. Y'all are spoiled with cdns and social media /s :D! In my experience torrents propagate pretty quickly so it could still work. Think the bigger issue would be the fact that people have preference for different resolutions, so you'd end up with massive torrent downloads that have 4k, 2k, 1080p, 720p, etc. Or multiple torrent files for different resolution. The worst outcome would of course be "creator just dumps 8k 60fps content on the network and tells you good luck".
Either way, I won't pretend like torrent net could match the service of youtube right now - but I do think it could actually make a video network actually work, without prohibitive costs for the hosters and subscriptions for the basic users. It'd still be nice to support creators and the trackers but those aren't as big of an ask as "host hundreds of 4k videos per creator forever".
[edit] as a last minute thought - I think I know another reason why torrents may not work so well. You'd have to have an app or a browser extension to use them, which limits the accessibility compared to "open url and watch".