Floatplane Media?

do you have any idea how long it takes to get to Kamino from here? ulgh just stopping for a bit of uranium is sketchy as heck

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Ayyyy, thanks for replying keeps everything from being wild speculation.

I won't be surprised if we see even more distribution models in the future now that YouTube isn't the sure bet it used to be.

Not that making a living on YT is a sure bet lol.

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I'm confident you'll be going there with dot dot, he's your evil plan to take over the galaxy.

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Hey this dude said exactly what I was thinking but forget to say. Although this guy is a new member, he seems like he knows what he's talking about.

When you get burned by the entity that's controlling your income, it's time to look for another place to work. Even if you have to create your own place for you and others to work.

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Why not just use media goblin? that already does a lot of what you would want to do and open source so you could just fork. Decentralized distrobution is the future, no sense fighting it.

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About half as long as it takes to get to Arakis?


I can see this being a good thing perhaps (competition to youtube). Competition is almost always good, is it not?

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It's not really intended to be competition to YouTube. It will be a good thing, but never large enough to compete in any meaningful way, at least not for a VERYYYYY long time.

EDIT: Unless you're talking specifically about YouTube Red. I could see the tech people using this instead if enough of the tech YT people make videos on Floatplane

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Some competition, however small, is better than no competition I guess.

I just don't like the power Youtube has. Both in terms of business but also in it's ability to choose what sort of news is seen and what sort of news is not seen. So anything that takes away some of that power is a good thing in that book. Anything that keeps them on their toes.

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Yeah, I just think we should look to other services that are more similar to YT as competition and a potential replacement should YouTube tank it. Floatplane is just a nice way to support content creators, other than patreon or something.

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@LinusTech If you truly intend for it to be a Vessel-like service where the focus is on early access that will ultimately end up on a bigger platform where any particular video would be getting the bulk of its views, then the vast majority of your bandwidth would go to serving videos not yet on YouTube that are still in the early-access window. A half-dozen different bit rates times the number of videos in early access is a small data set. You could save a ton of bandwidth if you used the Bittorrent protocol (or some variant thereof). You could use your CDN to start the videos using HTTP (so that they start/change bit rate quickly), but then it could download pieces from others that happen to be watching that particular video and bit rate at the same time. HTTP seeding is part of the protocol. The protocol has been implemented in JavaScript so you wouldn't have to develop it from scratch or anything. edit: I just did a quick Google search and the first thing that came up looks like it's even built for node.js https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

It sounds like a fun project to be involved in the development; however I am not a JavaScript programmer (I'm an engineer by training and work mostly in C and assembly). If I remember, I'll shoot the idea over to Luke, CatBoiler and the rest of the devs over on the LTT forum. Good luck!

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Even taking a small cut like patreon could be a huge gain in revenue if they can get the growth. As long as the product is always cash flow positive(sure LTT wouldn't create unless it makes sense financially) then even if it never gains that much traction it would still be worth the experiment. Worse case you break even or force YT to elevate their game or best case its a huge revenue source for the company.

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I don't think you'll find many people who would pay for a service where the customer is burdened with the distribution of the content (however minimal)

What was good for Standard Oil would be good for Youtube, Hatebook, PM$ and Google.
Chop Chop Chop:)....you can google anti-trust, makes google nervous:)

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I am pretty sure it will need to be distributed content to work no one is propping up a new content overlord but torrents are doing well. Watch the next season of game of thrones multiply across the tubes when it comes out.

Thats why I think something like LBRY will work. People will share for "free" within data caps content via uploading media and view for free so to speak and happy people can pay content providers directly because why not pay people you like.

Consider World of Warcraft. People pay a monthly subscription to play and Blizzard uses Bittorrent to distribute updates for the battle.net client and all of their games (not just WoW). While you have the game open, there is a trickle of updates going to other players that need the data files that you have. WoW may only have half of the subscribers that they once did, but that's still a large number that continue to pay while uploading in behalf of Blizzard.

Beyond that example, I think you have to consider that one of the purposes of paying for content is to support the creator. Those that would be paying for such a service are superfans not just casual viewers. Reducing the creator's overhead cost does help them and I think that there are people that would be willing to help in that way.

Now, if data caps are the concern, they could implement an opt-out checkbox in each subscribers account settings. (Linus did say that they are creating a toolbox more than a platform to give individual creators more control, so some creators might make it an opt-in checkbox.) Metered connections could be a concern, but as long as there is an option it shouldn't be a problem.

@LinusTech it's really awesome seeing LMG (is it sub LMG or separate?) spearhead a project like this. Would have never expected this from you guys. :+1:

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Had an evil smile when I heard of Floatplane a while back during the WAN show. The concept has incredible potential if played right, and Linus knows it damn well.

I recon it is all about the quality of the ads instead of the quantity, and advertising companies are showing behavior that supports this point of view. A business model based on this would require a smaller amount of viewers to break-even, although its hard to tell what that number would be.
But given your experience with sponsored content, pre-rolls and integrations, I know you are working this angle.

It is highly unlikely we would chase any kind of distributed video streaming approach. There are DEFINITELY a lot of good reasons to like it, but there are a number of reasons we don't and if we don't NEED it we'd rather control the infrastructure.

As it is, we've got costs under control and we have seen enough evidence for a desire to support creators in this way that we're betting pretty big on this.

I think creators and fans are going to be pretty stoked in the long term.

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This is an idea I can support. Don't let anybody get to you with stories about how YouTube actually doesn't make money, and how it's all just going to be a flop.

There's a funny story on Bloomberg about Harry Shearer suing Vivendi for millions because they were underreporting profits from "This Is Spinal Tap" and of course the creators weren't getting their cut... Creators being scammed, sound familiar? The text mentions that a long-time "axiom" of Hollywood was that "the majority of movies lose money". To which Shearer said: “Nobody twisted Sony’s arm to say, ‘Hey, get out of the hardware business. Come make movies.’ They seem to know something.”

:information_source: And that's coming from someone who doesn't even like most of your videos.

The most interesting thing I read from Linus was that Vessel folded. No shocker there. Almost no viewers want to go away from watching YouTube. I sure as hell don't. As for supporting creators it seems like the best way to do so at this time is through Patreon a la Jim Sterling. He says it is a pain in the butt dealing with trying to create content on YouTube without getting content ID flagged or whatever so he doesn't even try anymore to not get content flagged. He instead just makes his money off the fan base. In regards to Patreon though I had some real problems with content creators getting money (Level1Tech, Crit.TV and Jim Sterling) without it messing up my bank account. I would prefer to do a direct payment from PayPal but this has never been an option I have seen. ...

Oh and as for generating money Linus when you refuse a former viewer's offer to send money by cheque for the years they enjoyed your content that is one less way to make a buck.

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