this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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[–] DylanMc6@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (4 children)

We need a leftist alternative to Twitch, and fast. Seriously!

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The challenge is the bandwidth required is prohibitively expensive. From hyperscalers like AWS we're talking 5-10 cents per GB of egress.

Lets do some quick math! Suppose we have a 2 hour live stream with 1000 viewers

2 hours of 72030fps h.264 video at 10mbps bitrate would be about 9GB. at 5 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth that's $0.45 for each viewer who watches the whole stream.

Lets supposed 25% of viewers watched the whole stream, 25% saw an hour of it and 50% watched only 15 minutes of it

250*0.45=112.5
250*0.225=56.25
250*0.05625=28.125
112.5+56.25+28.125=196.875

So that 2 hour stream cost the platform about $200 in bandwidth alone.

If we extrapolate this to match Hassanabi's first YouTube stream numbers where he had around 140k concurrent viewers, and triple the length to match his normal 6 hour stream length, that comes out to a cost of about $84k in bandwidth costs alone for that single stream. The real cost is probably 2-3x that once you factor in all other infrastructure and engineering costs. Lets call it 250k for some easy math (and we're well beyond the point of back of the envelope math making any sense). Assuming a similar stream is hosted 5 days a week, that's a cost of 65 million dollars per year. Will Hassan pay at least $65 million in platform fees during that year? Maybe! But there's a reason Twitch is losing money hand over fist


But lets be honest with ourselves, any open alternative to Twitch would either be so small as to be hosted on a cheap VPS setup with fixed costs or big enough to be just as bad as Twitch is about things. And since a given person has about as good a chance at winning the lottery as they do at becoming a professional streamer, we aren't talking even a thousand viewers, we're talking a few hundred probably at best. At that scale, peertube is a very good option (especially with its brilliant bandwidth sharing features)

TL;DR Feel free to go build your leftist alternative to Twitch on Peertube!

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

Maybe there could be something like torrents but for streaming, where by watching you're forwarding that stream to others.

[–] Abundance114@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

I know an excellent leftist alternative to Twitch, it's called Twitch.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Better put it in a country that is not susceptible to US influence, which is about none of them. 2024 was our last fucking chance. We have a wild card in 2028 and you motherfuckers are blowing it trusting these establishment democrats, we need a white dude the talks like mandami that knows how to build and run a political machine.

2028?

Do you think we'll get mid terms?

[–] uberdroog@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago

The fact that its owned by Amazon it should be protested to oblivion.