• Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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    2 months ago

    The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Processing isn’t the expensive part. It’s bandwidth. Transferring that much data gets expensive.

      • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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        2 months ago

        Right, that’s probably true. Video encoding hardware and storage is incredibly cheap, but we get talks from netflix engineers where they’re talking about how they’re limited by dram bandwidth on their servers.

        Some napkin math:

        Youtube has ~7M average concurrent viewers.

        https://streamscharts.com/overview?platform=youtube

        A 1080p av1 stream is roughly 2-3mbits, maybe 5mbits for 60fps. You could serve all of those users with 14tbps of bandwidth, then.

        Stockholm peering pricing for 14tbps (rough ballpark at this scale tbf) over 43x 400gbit ports at a Stockholm Internet eXchange, would cost about 240k EUR/month, with a 25% volume discount.

        https://www.netnod.se/ix/netnod-ix-pricing

        For comparison, Mastodon’s monthly donations are about 30k EUR/month, and lemmy.world receives about 2k EUR/month.

        Super rough calculations, but there’s probably enough of a base in the fediverse for us to take over like 5% of Youtube’s viewer base, funded through donations. Not as cheap as wikipedia, but still doable with a committed open-source community. Beyond that, and a netflix/spotify/nebula subscription model would allow to fund further market share.

        It’s notable to see though that Nebula seems to have millions in monthly revenue, but only about 700k subscribers (aka barely 100k concurrent streams). However I believe the majority of their expenses are going towards their creators and towards marketing for future growth.

        But yeah, I think network effect is a bigger barrier than cost here.

        • Auli@lemmy.ca
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          2 months ago

          Think your numbers are a little off. I think YouTube has more thrn 7 million concurrent users. Largest streaming platform by a large margin.

      • Maeve@kbin.earth
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        2 months ago

        And our own bandwidth, too. Google isn’t paying my Internet bill. Hope the rest of my content creators switch soon, otherwise I’ll miss them.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yes, that’s also why bittorrent (which PeerTube runs on, by the way) is a figment of our collective imaginations, impossible to viably implement.

        • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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          2 months ago

          Torrenting was created precisely to solve the bandwidth problem of monolithic servers. You very obviously have no idea how torrents (or PeerTube for that matter) works.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Was my sarcasm not thick enough?

            My point was that PeerTube works just fine because BitTorrent is viable.

            • Auli@lemmy.ca
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              2 months ago

              But it’s not. People don’t upload as much as they download. Also internet connections are inferior in the upload speed.