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?)
150MB per 10min video, and that means it's 390,000Mb (or 380.86TB) for their collection.
Your overall point is fair, but your math here is off by a factor of 1000 - it would be around 380 GB.
Oh damn, forgot GB. So stupid, good catch. Fixing 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.
You are vastly overestimating the amount of storage you need since you are looking at some download which itself has to choose the encoding (which is independent of whatever youtube does: youtube absolutely crushes the quality).
Most estimates assume that youtube has 1 exabyte of storage, let's say we buy this in bulk from retail (which we wouldn't do: you wait as long as possible since storage prices are going down and retail stores would give you the finger if you ordered and exabyte worth).
Let's take that number and run with it:
Buying retail, you can get Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for 280€, 1 exabyte is 1Mio terabyte, meaning we have 1_000_000/20 * 280 = 14 Mio € (you'd need machines to put those into but you also wouldn't buy the entire thing upfront, and using retail prices either).
Compute also isn't that big of a deal if you do it correctly: the expensive part in video hosting is usually video encoding since to get small video sizes you need to spend compute beforehand to compress it.
However, you can shift this in significant parts to the user by implementing the transcoding in WASM and running this clientside (see e.g. https://www.w3.org/2021/03/media-production-workshop/talks/qiang-fu-video-transcoding.html) in that case users would compress locally in the browser before uploading (this presumably wouldn't even take longer than normal uploads for most people since you trade off transcoding time against upload time).
There are still other compute expenses but those are much more limited.
These mechanisms don't (at least to my knowledge) exist in peertube yet, but would be possible.
The actually expensive part is always the actual networking: Networking is one of the few things that actually get more expensive at scale due to the complexity explosion, rather than cheaper (e.g. having dedicated transcoding hardware drops in price per user since you have higher utilization).
Networking quickly runs into bottlenecks where you have to account for all the covariances between datasets in the network.
Basically to increase the amount of e.g. storage available everything in the network needs to be increased (from the local machines connections, over the cables and switches up to routers and outgoing connections) due to you increasing the density at one point, you have to increase the network everywhere.
That's why networking dwarfs everything: you just get crushed by networking being the bottleneck between your increasingly dense devices.
The clue behind peertube is that this is not as extreme of an effect due to
The latter is the important part: instead of having network cost rising (super) linearly to the amount of users you have it rise linearly to the amount of simultaneous unique videos.
This is a much smaller number which means you do not need to compete in that space, which is the dominant cost factor. (if you have a method where one user can retain the video and share it without actively watching that same video, you can probably get real-world sublinear scaling)
Mind you, the costs involved here are still large, but not insurmountably large, especially considering there is not one unique organisation that would have to pay for the entire thing and its not an upfront expense. Fundamentally though the system is built such that it won't be crushed as users flood into the network.
That's why it needs to be an international project. Paid by every country together. Sure some will initially have to pay more but sooner or later everyone wants to be part of it and pay their part.
Who said it needs to compete in scale as a single entity? PeerTube was never planned to be run by a single large provider
PeerTube will not replace youtube.
I didn't say it would. Mastodon looked vastly different when it had its first wave of users. Peertube will look very different in the future as well.
PeerTube will be a real competitor to YouTube when the Year of the Linux Desktop happens.
Well, that's perfect, because that's going to be [insert next calendar year here].
I feel like all of these fediverse platforms are going to suffer from the same issue.
I searched up peertube and clicked on the peertube link. No where was there a "recommend videos" feed or "upload videos" or "create account" and the first link to a peertube platform is a cliche "rebellion" something or other.
These things will never see mass adoption if they aren't approachable to the casual browser. It sucks, but the average user would rather give their data to Google or watch 25sec of ads before each video then try to figure out fediverse. Especially since when you do figure it out, there isn't any good content yet.
I didn't mean that the average user will migrate to peertube. I meant that tech savvy people who share peertube's values might join.
Lemmy isn't easy to use either.
Just to name a few I think have nice videos right on their start page.
You can only make it so easy... If you want a centralistic platform with algorithmic recommendations, use YouTube... Emancipating oneself is work. But I'd agree onboarding for new users could and should be easier.
You don't need a centralized platform to have recommendations.
You just let users choose some tags and go from there. Each server will surface different videos, but if they all pull from everyone they're federated with it would be a lot more accessible pretty quickly. And let users opt in/out of watch history tracking to feed their suggestions.
It won't have the potential YouTube does, but YouTube's so compromised on intent that it could easily be better in practice if content availability were the same (which is obviously way off).
If you have a bunch of people guess how many M&M's are in a jar you can average the guesses and you'll come very close to the correct amount. A recommendation system can be very democratic in that way. When reddit still had their public API I would take advantage of this fact and use it to decide if something was a "deal" or not on PC parts. I was tracking the prices of computer ram at the time as an experiment. It worked very well. If they are federated properly, then their content can be filtered and appear on an instances front page.
No, because:
Content creators want to monetize their videos, even if it is shit monetization.
Users and content creators want discoverability.
They can monetize their videos on PeerTube, can't they? It has built-in Liberapay support
That would be like saying Patreon is monetizing video.
No. I mean ad-supported income that automatically comes with YouTube. Not to mention members subscription and Superchats which are also built in functions and represent significant part of content creators' income.
peertube is never gonna be a replacement for youtube, it's good as a "upload random stuff you made" platform but modern youtube is so detached from that
Mastodon might never replace twitter but it's still a cool platform with a similar use case.
I guess it depends on what you use it for.
I have two use cases, personally.
How to videos for stuff I don't know how to do. Like, fix a leaky spigot or something like that.
Following content creators.
I could see PeerTube being fine for #1, but I don't see it ever being positioned as a viable option for those who want to generate reasonable profit for their content. Would be happy to be proven wrong though.
YouTube algorithm: Yo, dawg, I heard you like spigots! Check out the latest spigot content from these awesome creators! Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on the freshest spigot uploads!
Peertube needs to really federate if it wants a fighting chance. Having to rely on Sepia Search to find videos just won't cut it for most people.
It also needs some big content producers using it in order to anchor it. And that requires it to enable an intuitive business model for those producers.
Patreon integration, payment processor integration, and ads management. And that last one is kind of anathema to a lot of people and projects on the Fediverse.
I am trying to move to towards peertube more but the creators aren't there yet so...
I really tried to visit the main instance regularly, which was hosted by the developer. But the latest video was 1 month old and every video there targeted a niche I don't care.
Yeah unfortunately it's not a viable replacement at the moment.
And I don't think we can solve this easily. I've heard bigger creators say they want to make money with their videos. And Peertube doesn't do ads, so it doesn't pay the creators. And we're kind of going in circles now anyways because your initial suggestion was to switch to Peertube because of the YouTube ads. We can not have them and don't have them at the same time.
Maybe the solution is sponsoring. I heard ad revenue had declined anyways and many creators mainly rely on sponsoring nowadays.
Ad blocking is always going to be a game of Whac-a-Mole, with YT's latest efforts likely converting some users to turning it off or subscribing while pushing others away.
Thing is, converting a nonzero number is, in a vacuum, all that's needed to make the line go up.
When YT insinuated its way around uBO, I tried Piped and Invidious, both of which had such severe drawbacks that I was relieved to find instructions on how to update uBO to once again get around it.
But I'm one of those people who simply cannot handle the audio of advertising. That overexcited tone announcing grandiose solutions to invented problems makes my blood boil to the point that I've not listened to the radio outside of NPR since the '90s, have never had a cable subscription and never bought rabbit ears. I do not stream anything on my phone for the same reason. If advertising is part of the package, well, that's what VPNs and torrents are for ... unless I can purchase the content without it for a reasonable price (my Beatport collection confirms this).
But there's no fucking way I will pay for a service that includes advertising. And on YT, even though that's nominally what happens if you pay, well ... there's a reason SponsorBlock is also a thing. Spotify absolutely baffles me. I have no problem spending $10 (or whatever it's up to now) a month on music, but I damn well better own that music in perpetuity if I'm paying for it.
It's impossible to avoid being manipulated in life, but it's not particularly difficult to excise voices telling you how much happier you'll be if you buy something.
I’m placing my bets on piped video instead, for now at least. YouTube needs something more tragic, like getting acquired by Elon Musk, before it bleeds for real.
Not until they make it possible for creators to make money. At least with a patreon type system on peertube itself
That's without doubt the worst feature of YouTube.
The amount of algorithm spam is unfathomable. A web search of "how do I ...?" went from one line responses to ten minute videos with an automated voice.
There last ten years of internet have been a mistake.
The near stranglehold YT has had on online video could not last forever. I think they'll be the 800 pound gorilla for years to come, but I hope many smaller guys pick up speed as YT continues to throw its weight around. And I believe YT will continue to shit on users and eventually pay a high price for that.
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
How long until YT is totally paywalled?
Probably never. I doubt they could offset ad revenue with subscription fees.
Bold of you to assume they would stop rolling ads instead of simply requiring a "fair and reasonable ad supported tier".
Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
Yeah sure. Because creators don't need to eat or pay rent or anything.
If people have bet their livelihoods on fleeting hobbies on platforms that actively fuck them over, repeatedly, then frankly I can't be too upset about it.
People will make stuff for free because they enjoy it. Most people don't have much free time to chase their creative hobbies; I wish we didn't live in a world where artists have to justify their existence by monetary means, but let's not pretend that ads are paying for the creative underclass.
So far most instances do not want to federate so it's getting anoying to discover new content.
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