Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow. Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.
Sure, ad revenue is an important method of funding media, but that is a very different claim from saying that YouTube's implementation of ad delivery is anything close to good.
The simple fact is that the ad ecosystem YouTube directs has produced lots of low effort "content" farming, enterprises focused on raw output at the expense of quality, truth, and frequently the intellectual property of others.
> Sure, ad revenue is an important method of funding media
No it isn't. It's a horrible method of funding media because as you correctly realized it ends up lowering the quality of that media. This isn't just a problem with YouTube's implementation, it is an inherent aspect of ad-based funding.
I didn't say it is a desirable method, but look at any (mass) media and you will find ads and sponsorships there: clearly they are important to the production of (mass) media.
I mean, the other well known way is to pay with money directly. YT offers that. But certain people don't want to pay, either directly or with their attention.
What other avenue is there to pay for stuff you consume ?
That may be true, but if you don't like YouTube, go somewhere else.
The argument that it's your machine and you choose what to run on it no longer holds when YouTube clearly no longer wants people with ad blockers as visitors.
So watch ads, pay up, or go somewhere else.
I always get downvoted for stating the obvious, but YouTube's monopoly was helped by adblockers, because alternatives, like Vimeo, couldn't differentiate themselves by being ads-free.
Some people would be ok with paying but you cannot pay and still be an anonymous user. You need to be logged in and trust that Google won’t track you if you ask them not to.
How about no?
There are anti competitive practices at place here and we are not supposed to just sit and take it, not all of us are Americans that accept unrestricted capitalism with the no breaks.
I suppose you were also fine with Unity's change of toś and pricing, but many others weren't. We sent a strong enough message to the company so that their CEO resigned and hit them hard in the wallet and now they know better. As should you.
What happened here is they cornered the market (a monopoly), and now are rising prices and making it impossible to use their product without giving them both your data AND money. The same thing can happen to your water, electricity and phone bills, if the governments didn't mandate anticompetitive practices in law. That is the same reason Verizon in the US is so expensive yet so bad in terms of value for money.
Stop pushing your 'accept it or move on' mentality on others. There is lot to be done here with collective action and government support, not every country is 'everybody on their own' and
'Big Corp rule' like the US. So stop it.
We don't want to go somewhere else unless we can help it, and are willing to fight for a better internet.
I'm curious -- what do you want to happen in this situation? What is your best desired outcome? It sounds like you are arguing that video sharing sites are a utility?
Video sharing sites of the size/impact of Youtube, similarly to social platforms like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter whatever, and platforms like Google Search/Maps, etc have a tremendous impact on society. They have become a major way of how people communicate, make daily choices, purchasing decisions, vacation plans, etc.
When a company is that big and that impactful (despite being a for-profit company), it is in interest to the general public that there are some checks and balances in place.
For me, the best scenarios is governments involve themselves as they involve themselves in other areas of business:
- telecommunications and utilities (Verizon)
- transport (Uber has different treaties/operating models in different countries)
- online marketplaces (Google)
Only through treating these behemoths as providers of "public goods/utilities" via our governments, can we have them not regressing to what any monopoly would naturally regress to: arrogant hands-twisting thugs, not afraid to exploit their users for every penny.
Keep in mind that governments already DO involve themselves in the business (mal)practices of these tech giants. For example, Tesla's new cybergarbage is unlikely to pass a scruitiny in the EU due to pedestrian safety/impact concerns. Google/Facebook/Instagram all have to respect the GDPR and its US cousin the CCPA, etc, etc. If it wasn't for measures like this, you'd not have "do-not-track" options in your browser, nor would you have adblockers in the Google play store...
I simply want MORE, quicker and better government involvement into anticompetitive practices that (mostly) US tech giants use.
in other words, the proposed is a policy for which other people (whom you view as having more wealth) gets taxed for a benefit for which you will gain.
In my country I am taxed 52%, and I don't mind that. I clearly see the money going into public infrastructure, roads, public transport, social housing, greening the cities, etc. If I am unable to work due to illness, I will benefit from 80% of my salary for many years, and after that, 70%. You should give more to the system proportionately to how wealthy you are. People with 10 mansions and a fleet of cars and a private jet while there are homeless on the streets, that is an abberation. The current system is failing because when people get beyond a certain amount of wealth, their wealth can increase exponentially, while they are not taxed exponentially. It's a finite planet, after all. Infinite wealth growth of a few while many can barely afford rent is like cancer and should be taxed to oblivion.
If I was earning more, I would not mind sharing an ever increasing percentage of that in terms of taxes. I don't need 20 houses and 20 cars, and my own rocket, no individual person needs that. People like that should not be allowed to exist by the government.
Btw here are two recent examples what can be done when a monopoly like Youtube tries using their dominant position in the market to squeeze workers or consumers:
As you can see, both organized worker action and government oversight work very well to curb greedy companies. So please, when you see people outraged and trying to organize, if you don't want to join, don't, but don't try to tell people to 'just accept it', because we won't. We are angry and have had it up to here with corporate greed.
>Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does
I think there's still plenty of room for innovation in the ad serving front. YouTube is far worse than it used to be. It currently has multiple ads in a 10 minute video many of which have one 5-10 second mandatory clip followed by a much longer clip that can be skipped after 5-10 seconds.
The "you have to have the remote in hand to prevent even more ads" is pretty user hostile.
To make matters worse, on Android TV/Roku, many ads require HDCP so it's pretty normal for the device to require a reboot when ads start playing if the HDCP negotiation fails.
Youtube Premium is pretty expensive for a casual user ($144/yr).
The cost of servers/bandwidth isn't lost on me and Google gets the best rates in the industry, nonetheless. They're sufficiently big they can stick cache devices all over the place directly inside ISP networks (I assume they don't pay power/bandwidth on these since ISPs end up saving money)
I used to host video on a custom site, mainly lecture material for an audience of about 100-200 people so there were no economies of scale involved. A VPS with 2TB of transfer was about 10eur/m. Video was encoded for about 500MB/hr (encoders have improved, but hosting prices have probably increased so figures are just ballpark).
As a (very) small scale provider video was costing me about 0.25 cents / hour. It is certainly cheaper for a larger provider. Ad rates are not that low, the margins involved are huge.
For a premium server I would take a heavy user as a model, say 8hr/day, giving a cost of 60 cents per month. Assume processing fees and overheads are about 30%, and a user is willing to pay $10/m for a service. That still leaves $6.40 to be split between platform and content creator.
Yes, video is expensive compared to text. But in absolute terms the costs are not that expensive.
> Any competitor will have the same problems as Youtube does.
PeerTube distributes the load among many independent servers, which can be even run by individuals. So no, not every competitor will have the same problems.
So the cost is borne by users' power bills, data rates and available bandwidth. If PeerTube usage were scaled to the level of Youtube (making it a competitor) that would absolutely turn into a problem.
What about someone who gets several million views per video they upload? You would need one hell of a peertube instance with a great CDN to manage that so people all over the world can watch it without constant buffering.
Peertube technically has P2P, but these days with strict NAT or CGNAT being common good luck getting any kind of P2P connection going for the majority of people. Plus a lot of people on both home and mobile connections have very restrictive data caps.
Yeah I addressed that in my comment too. The link you sent doesn't show any data that I can see? It would be neat to see someone actually test peertube under heavy load with data to back it up.
Peertube is just self hosted video hosting. You either need to pay someone a lot of money to host it for you, or do it yourself with the constant maintenance that comes with it.
How do we distribute the cost? Say a popular creator uploads a video to a peertube instance and gets 10 million views, the video is 10 minutes and 15mbps bitrate, that's roughly 10 petabytes of data the peertube server needs to send.
If we take say, Vultr as an example for outgoing data costs, that's something like $100,000 of data for a single video.
Yes P2P will take some of that load off, but not that much with how restrictive NAT is these days.
Can you explain it a little? Because I'm not sure I get it. As far as I know peertube is centralized with a P2P element on top, but P2P only works if at least one side has an open port.
It sounds like you get it but what I'm saying is you just add colo'd (or whatever) peers. Nobody in particular needs to be responsible for that. Bandwidth in Eastern Europe, for example, is dirt cheap - practically free. It'd be similar to how we do Mastodon: a bunch of different peer networks with a bunch of different funding and management models. You don't need to rely on the instance server for hosting, just initial seeding. Think of it like the original seeder in BitTorrent (a model which we see working great to this day because people rent dirt cheap seedboxes.)
Does peertube support using another host as a dedicated P2P peer, and it would load balance over available hosts? I feel like I looked into that before and it was only clients watching the video that could do it.
But if it can now, that would be the missing piece that I wasn't getting.
As far as I understand it that is possible in multiple ways. What's not currently possible (unless something changed) is load balancing write operation.
>Video hosting is expensive and needs to be paid for somehow
If it's SO expensive, and SO needs to be paid somehow by someone why do they waste so much time and money trying to push videos on me I've either A) Already watched, B) have blocked and said "Don't recommend this channel" or C) are not even related to my search query at all, yeah YouTube I'm aware Sniperwolf and MrBeast exist, No I don't want to watch them now or ever I'm searching for pasta recipes and I'm certain you have more than 4 you could show me before trying to get me to watch asinine sniperbeast content.
You can go the Nebula route and require users to pay (which means far fewer users) or require creators to pay (which means far fewer creators). You could also require creators to host the videos themselves, but that also requires money, expertise and causes downtime when a video goes viral.
There's also P2P, but far too many users are on mobile and behind NATs these days for that to make sense. Even if this wasn't the case, P2P is a privacy and legal nightmare, it's trivial for companies to track what IP addresses watch what videos, and seeding of copyright-infringing content usually has far worse legal consequences than merely watching.