Progressive Politics

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!