Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
rwhitisissle
joined 1 year ago
A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It's fundamentally unreliable.
only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand
Scalability isn't just about distribution. It's about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That's the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have...nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.
Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn't been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.
The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn't made anyone's life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.
Boy howdy, users sure would love to pivot to a peer distributed content system that randomly downloads chunks of a video file as they become available with speeds of anywhere between 2 bytes and 2 megabytes a second (which one you'll get depends on who you're getting the chunks from) with literally no guarantee of being able to even complete said download because the people they're downloading it from may not all have the entire file's worth of combined data across their respective computers, and they have to download the entire video before watching it to determine whether or not they even want to watch it in the first place. Also, there's no capacity for monetization without literally doing what Google is trying to do and injecting advertisements directly into the video, so there's no incentive for any content producers to use this system to distribute said content, meaning it would be a ghost town of a service from the start.
Yep, that would be a great system. /s
Man, you're definitely spot on with this. For me, it's a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don't have to pay attention to. It's ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I'll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I'm going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it's sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I'll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan's Island or something on in the background.
I… I… Don’t know how to interpret this comment…
To be completely genuine: it's a satirical comment made as a cynical representation of the perspective of a conservative democrat. A lot of it comes from the combined perspective of "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" along with the conservative "love it or leave it" mentality you find coming from people who criticize progressives for criticizing the nation in which they live.
RBG is one of the greatest travesties in recent American political history. She was already old as hell when Obama was in office and there was a perfect time to get her to retire and appoint a younger justice. Her ego wouldn't allow it because she saw herself as the greatest living supreme court justice and that nobody could ever hope to fill her shoes as long as she was alive. And then her smug ass fucking died and we had to suffer the consequences of her choices. Obama should have been like "get your fucking geriatric ass off the bench and onto a beach somewhere. Fuck off; you're done." But he was too busy ordering drone strikes on Afghan weddings to do that. Or too much of a coward to risk pissing off a justice.
Just remember, people: the US is always one election away from sudden, irrevocable demise. But if you elect the conservative with a D next to their name, then America gets to continue its slow, but inexorable socioeconomic decline as the executive and legislative representatives continue to ignore the policies of the progressives who held their nose to keep them in power. Asking for anything more is both foolish and, even worse, selfish.
As a conservative democrat myself, who will never be forced to compromise any of my ideological positions because the status quo of every election being "too important to lose" is at this point part of the core design of our two party political system, I can say with confidence that if I were ever faced with the choice of voting between an outright fascist and a socialist candidate, that I would definitely vote the only way that made sense to preserve the corporate oligarchy on which the fragile veneer of American democracy rests. Which is to say that I would vote for the fascist, obviously.
If you want to actually vote for progressive candidates, then you are free to move to Mexico and start farming avocados for the cartels.
Needs more completely unrelated self-aggrandizement and nationalistic pandering.
American style neoliberalism has become the only game in town and any minor deviation is seen as dangerous extremism. Its easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
I'm just gonna leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
It's actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it'll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you're asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well....I don't want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I'll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there's a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.