pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



pendell
@pendell

like. Do it like Telegram does it, where there's no server-side re-encoding and it's just a file size limit. I feel like that must cost less overall to implement, you remove the compute power cost and then it's just bandwidth.

Hell make it pay-per-upload or something. If I have to pay $2 to upload a video with a maximum size of 200mb I'll do it. I will do it, I say.

It would also make uploading videos much more purposeful and intentful, and therefore each video you encounter more special and hopefully creative and thought out.

also not re-encodind would allow me to upload actually decent quality stuff recorded at 480i60 because every other website on the planet compresses that stuff to hell and I think when the bitrate is actually decent 480 can look really nice


pendell
@pendell

$1 per 100mb of video. I'm calling it right now. It would be way more sustainable and it would mean the platform would likely not be spammed with meaningless guff taking up server space and wasting bandwidth for users. It's an idea!


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in reply to @pendell's post:

for what it's worth, I sat down and did the math just now and, through our provider, at retail prices, the raw break-even on $1/100mb of video is about 500,000 streams, assuming that there's no cost other than just serving it -- i.e., if your video is seen by more than that many people, we're losing money on hosting it -- and even at an average bitrate of 480p30, you'll be burning through that 100mb in a minute and a half. the economics of streaming video are Not Great unless you're a big provider who owns a bunch of infrastructure, and that's the main reason it hasn't been a priority for us yet.

Fair and understandable! But as Cohost doesn't prioritize Algorithms or Constant User Growth I feel it would take a good long while to reach 500k streams, even plenty of videos I come across on Tumblr don't reach that number because they don't prioritize pushing video (also might have to do with their video player sucking so much people don't bother with them but it can't be the only reason)

Understandable that this might be a feature to hold off on until you've got all the other payment systems (and therefore revenue sources) in place. But it would be great to see crowdfunded video hosting. Like once it runs out of views for the amount of money put into it, the uploader is notified, but also anyone can choose to toss another dollar into the Video Machine and make it playable once again for everyone. Would help build that sense of community methinks, a radically different approach to hosting video that seems to make it sustainable.

Also I could fit at least 5 minutes into 100mb of 480p30, cmon... And if cohost allowed uploads of more efficient codecs like h.265 or even AV1 yes I know the playback would be limited by what the browser and device supported you could pull off some impressive stuff in 100mb. Although the added moderation costs of keeping outright piracy down to avoid DMCA trouble would be a concern.