this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
756 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
59414 readers
2846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
and considering i've never heard about it until you just mentioned it, I guess that means its very not big and very not a youtube competitor.
Also, a p2p video site will never work. cause you will just be offloading the bandwidth and storage burdens onto individuals who are far far less equipped to handle suhc things on their personal connections than a major video provider.
I believe it works like Bittorent (and things like Windows updates) where there is a swarm of peers that simultaneously upload and download to/from eachother, so the original creator, or any single user, doesn't necessarily need much bandwidth. There are some disadvantages to this, but it is manageable, and works for many other things. If it actually became a thing, I imagine sponsored/patreon-funded creators would pay someone to seed their videos to ensure availability and quality. Fans would probably help too. Technically, it's a viable option.
But yeah, with how walled-garden the Internet has become, it probably won't become popular without massive amounts of marketing and doing things like signing exclusivity deals with popular creators, which needs a lot of money.
Thats still going to get up petabytes of bandwidth at scale, and it will be sobs like you eating the cost of it. Which is why it'll never work.
Bandwidth is cheaper the bigger in bulk you buy it, which is pretty much the only reason youtube of today is viable at all.. All your peer2peer idea does is the same thing that every business in America does... Socialize the costs and privatize the profits.
It has been a long time since i've heard someone go crazy on the whole "p2p can fix anything/everything" spiel though. Its long since been overtaken by the whole "blockchain can fix anything/everything" spiel, so it was quite nostalgic hearing it again.
How does torrentijg work, then?
Not at all, if you are trying to serve a file to millions, if not billions, of simultaneous user downloads.