this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
15 points (94.1% liked)
Open Source
30282 readers
506 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Using WebRTC it won't lag. At least not for popular streams. For obscure content that no one watches. It might. But that isn't some deal breaker. It supports high resolution just fine. But honestly we don't need a ton of different resolutions for every video. It's a luxury and a convenience. Realistically with modern codex today the difference in bandwidth while not insignificant. Again is not a deal breaker. The distribution isn't all through a single entity. It is highly distributed.
Personally I had not messed with any peer tube instances for a year and a half or so. So the other night I installed it on an Android device and the experience has come leaps and bounds. If the content were there. And loading up as all the content that I did watch did. I could absolutely see myself using it. The issue will be content. And perhaps monetizing it. Though there is a lot of content that for one reason or another can't be monetized. Which would be perfectly happy on a service like this.
The issue is the content, of course, but also the problems will come with the content. Peertube works great for what it currently does, but when it comes time to scale up, it gets a lot harder to distribute videos among so many hosts. Right now it flies under most radars, what happens if it becomes even 1/10000 as popular as youtube is and people start uploading full TV show episodes? Porn? Monetization is an issue too, because we unfortunately live in capitalism and making actually good video content takes time and effort that people can't do in their free time - if Peertubers got 1/10000th the views that a YouTuber gets and they're not getting kickbacks "from PeerTube" because the whole point is not doing that, and the kind of sponsors you skip with Sponsorblock would obviously rather pay to have their ad shown to 10,000 times the audience by sponsoring a youtuber instead.
Honestly. Not as much as you might think. A lot of YouTubers are trying to get away from the algorithm and the rat race that is YouTube monetization. That is the more established ones for sure. The smaller ones still definitely rely on it at this point. But it isn't sustainable either. And a lot of people are looking for a way out. Many of them now rely more on patreon than anything. And with services like Patreon as long as they can get the content out to satisfy people they will still get paid no matter how they get it out there. Though there are still gaps that could be monetized perhaps.
As far as copyright content, has that ever stopped them from uploading it to YouTube? It's going to happen. There are still Napster like services out there for music piracy as well. If you know where to look. I would think instances that do that sort of thing will probably be pretty isolated. But they will exist. Likely in nations with lax copyright laws and enforcement. But the copyright wars as they currently exist are not sustainable long-term. They need to find ways to get the content to the people that want to see it for a reasonable compensation. Yes there will be people who will always want something for free. But they would also be plenty of people willing to watch commercials etc like the old days to see the content as well. Peer tube honestly could be a next step towards arriving to something like that. But only time will tell.
About the monetization, I think that a paywall can work