Floatplane Media?

Amazon also has a CDN, for global coverage... You'd probably want that. It's roughly 4x the cost, to distribute automagically globally.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

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EDITED: Edited for clarity on sources.

That's all good. But you must also transcode each video to every smaller resolution permutation of it. Which will be a lot of CPU time. Amazon also has a service for this, but CPU time is much more expensive than bandwidth.

Using Amazon Elastic Transcoding.
Standard Definition – SD (Resolution of less than 720p) $0.015 per minute
High Definition – HD (Resolution of 720p or above) $0.030 per minute
Audio $0.0045 per minute

The only way I can imagine this working, from a technical perspective. Is if it is a curated service so that the amount of hosted content is small enough to be manageable. If it allows any random person in the public to upload to it, it will quickly become spammed out of existence.

The only way services like full30 survive is through having a very narrow subject matter. So floatplane may work. If it can become the full30 of technology. Because perspective companies will know exactly what kind of content they are going to be put under. And that they will have a very captive audience.

Of course I would love for someone to correct me.

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You are correct, this is not for any yahoo to upload videos.
initially it will be invite only but even beyond that I think they are going to vet creators who may be on the platform.

It would be much cheaper to automate something like that... From digital ocean., Amazon has gpu clusters which may work better.

That's what I was getting at. CPU time does not mean specifically only from a CPU. It's a generic term referring to performing processing. Those prices I found. Are from amazon.

What if Linus built his own server farm? Can you imagine the infinite vlogs and cesspool of youtube comments!

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I'd rather not watch him fumble(pun intended) through more server stuff he doesn't understand. Plus, as a Canadian, I know that would be near impossible. Wage costs too much. Energy is even more. The only advantage is cooling. Which he won't benefit from in Brittish Columbia as it is the warmest province. Not even to mention our disgusting lack of fiber connections.

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Allan Jude would have good insight on this as his company does something very similar to this.

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Do you have a link, I am not familiar.

Yup. I feel like they can beat the Amazon price.

I have quite a bit of xp in this sector. I see Linus sort of becoming an ad agency/media partner in the longer term. If nothing else the existence of float plane is a huge or win for Linus whether or not it functions because he can play the role similar to what full screen or the other big MCN/etc.

Linus can broker ads for his platform and it's high value because it is targeted.

The transcoding cost we can assume is zero or nearly so because that can be offloaded -- we can cost minimize Amazon and use Amazon only for cost estimation. I know from experience that ec2 is about 2x the wholesale/bulk rate but for something bursty a cdn service is good.

There would have to be as many renditions as YouTube and defacto a higher bitrate . But two rendition formats...h264 and h265.

The cost of operating our small channel would be on the order of 5k/mo which would be a losing proposition.

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I wouldn't be surprised if they used this or something similar, It seems like the focus for FP is on the creators front end, I'm still waiting for the YT archive of the WAN so i can get some notes.

Edit: its up, I'll have links and notes up soon

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From the WAN 50:00


tl;dw
  • tiered subscriptions as creator sees fit
  • their own CDN?
  • better bit rate (not specific)
  • invite only initially
  • FP gets top banner and left side for ads or video suggestion?
  • Not YT replacement

I can't imagine more than 1/4 of Linus' YouTube's audience would bother to make the switch. We saw the same thing with Vessel. People are so lazy they wont even add a new bookmark to go to a different site for familiar content. I can't imagine this will be successful for Linus, it may even spell the end if he decides to not be conservative and go balls deep.

Only way I see it working is if they literally get a high percentage of the tech channels. Since I pay for YT red, doubt I would go even at that point.

A lot of people didn't make the switch due to
a ) privacy concerns
b ) knowing that the content would be behind a paywall after the free year

I didn't switch to Vessel either. I have too many accounts as is, really don't need yet another one just to watch the videos when I can watch them on YT without an account.

It isn't meant to get most of his audience to switch but another revenue stream in the face of less money coming in from google adsense.

getting away from Linus and FP, the the channel InRangeTV which has 86,587 subscribers on YT, they have 3,120 patrons currently, here are their stats from March

This channel is two guys, Karl and Ian from forgotten weapons, In the video from InRange in the OP Karl explains how google adsense money has plummeted but with much fewer patron than yt subs they have turned off all YT adsense on their channel and have spread the content to as many distribution points as possible.

The idea isn't to totally give YT the middle finger but also be free enough even if for what ever reason google decides to turn off the tap you aren't dead in the water.

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but since you have yt red all the creators you watch are getting a boost

I thinkg that is how red works please correct me if i am wrong
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Yeah they make a % based on my watch hours split between channels. Prob like 1c per view or some shit vs the .001 cent per view. I actually sub to red via play music (6 subs for $15 + play music) so not sure how that split works since its way more people.

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This math assumes that we intend to convert the entire audience. That's never been the intent. Only a small subset of super fans will be interested in supporting their favorite creators on Floatplane Club. At the scale we're targeting (for now) the costs don't go up too fast.

On the subject of costs, we have been up and running streaming video for months now with a small(ish) group of supporters through our forum (the website front end itself doesn't add much to our hosting cost compared to video streaming).

If the $$ didn't make sense do you think we'd be hiring a team.

C'mon now... Let's put the sillly on-camera persona aside for a moment here. I'm not an idiot.

Regards,
Linus

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