> With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently.
I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that everybody who anyone "trusts" wants to bill you per-gigabyte and if you want decent quality-of-experience you have to play ball with the CDNs, who then proceed to have a noose around your neck.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
I think, most strongly, it either has to not be video or consumers have to be willing to put up with early-2010s video jank. That's the crux of it: an audience trained on YouTube and even Twitch--despite their own jank, they're about as good as it gets for streaming and they're free--is much less likely to put up with something like a 2014 Giant Bomb media player (and 2014 Giant Bomb video quality; the cinematography was always great but 720p lasted for a long time in GB-land).
How far does PeerTube or something similar go towards solving this problem? You'll still need to seed the initial streams, but if you get a big spike of users, they'll seed the video amongst each other.
Peer to peer non-realtime video distribution has a pretty core fundamental flaw in that users are only seeding when they're watching. Users are likely to stop watching a video if it doesn't interest them, if something else comes up, or more importantly for this conversation, if there's a technical issue that prevents smooth playback.
When a user stops watching for whatever reason, they leave the swarm. If a client has been getting segments from a peer that is close to them, and that user completes watching the video and closes the browser window, that peer goes offline. The player client then needs to find another peer to pull segments from, and hope that the peer can deliver at the same speed. Because most of these player extensions are on top of HLS or DASH, you're not "buffering" in advance very far, so you're sensitive to this bump (this is tunable, and P2P clients generally buffer more segments than those delivered by CDNs exclusively). Whether you can't find a peer with the segments you need, or the peer can't deliver fast enough, or the algo stalls and doesn't fail back to CDN based delivery fast enough, you get a playback stall.
Playback stalls always add frustration, and they're often multiplicative. One stall, you assume there's an internet issue, and it'll be fine. Two stalls, you grow frustrated with the service. Three stalls, you close the window. And now there's another peer dropping out the swarm, causing more interruptions in playback for other users.
IMO, as the tech stands today, P2P video delivery doesn't work super well unless you're setting up a P2P CDN, or have some other mechanism that allows for a peer to more gracefully exit a swarm to avoid stalls and signal to clients to shift before an abrupt exit.
What are your thoughts on Popcorn time? That was quite successful even among non-technical people. Is the difference people were keeping their torrent client (ie PopcornTime) open all the time, providing seeds, which doesn't happen with a webpage that you just close? Is the solution a 'RSS reader', but for P2P videos?
You've hit the nail on the head. A set-top box that would keep a torrent active through normal seeding configurations out of band of the client worked wonders, because your ability to participate in the CDN wasn't determined by code you loaded in the player. You also have that it was targeting longer form content (>10min), so even if that was being shipped through these web based P2P clients, a person committed to a TV series or a movie would suffer through slightly more buffer jank.
Even then though, your average content viewer has different standards. We're opting for 1080p/4K content over the much more common smaller feeds. Netflix loads the first few segments of even the most esoteric content not in your local ISP cache in 100's of milliseconds, users flit from YouTube video to YouTube video randomly, and scroll TikTok like we used to scroll through the Twitter firehose back in the hey-day of the PopcornTime. More content is consumed on mobile devices than set-top boxes, which brings power and data constraints, both from metered data and with networks that are both highly latency variable and not tuned for upstream bandwidth, that make participation in a P2P swarm not ideal.
While content protection is certainly a core tenant of why content is centralized, if the big players at YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, et al, haven't figured out a way to shirk their highest cost center in lieu of putting it on the backs of someone else even cheaper than ISPs without causing a substandard consumer experience with P2P, then you can be darn sure that this is a tough nut to crack.
From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it's your responsibility. No, nobody cares about the explanation and if you are in a place where you must explain "well, actually, it's the viewer's fault that my thoughtful video is next to some guy hanging swastikas in his bonus room," you have already and irrevocably lost. (This can, I want to note, happen in a more diminished form on other platforms--there's nothing stopping somebody's YouTube recommendations from being a disaster area. But people know what YouTube is. They know YouTube picks the hits. PeerTube isn't that, and having to explain at all is what would sink it.)
Also, even if you ignore the "we're camping next to fascists" vibe of the whole thing, PeerTube quality-of-experience management is deeply poor besides. If you're using some small DIY CDN, you have predictably bad performance, instead of suddenly bad performance, and if you're using a big CDN, you have working traffic steering.
You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance.
If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.
Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad performance for some users in ways that cannot be reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend the latter for most use cases.
I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.)
I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.
That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube frontend.
The other problem is that doing high quality video content is hard - you can do a one-man channel but it will NEVER be as "flashy" as channels that have dedicated editors, etc. And once you have a group, you have deadlines and income requirements you have to meet.
I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that everybody who anyone "trusts" wants to bill you per-gigabyte and if you want decent quality-of-experience you have to play ball with the CDNs, who then proceed to have a noose around your neck.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
I think, most strongly, it either has to not be video or consumers have to be willing to put up with early-2010s video jank. That's the crux of it: an audience trained on YouTube and even Twitch--despite their own jank, they're about as good as it gets for streaming and they're free--is much less likely to put up with something like a 2014 Giant Bomb media player (and 2014 Giant Bomb video quality; the cinematography was always great but 720p lasted for a long time in GB-land).