Floatplane Media

So The old thread is closed. So its about to kick off and I am interested. After the last WAN show where Luke has left to be COO and there is some unknown owner and offsite hosting. But Luke is sub letting in LMG on site.

What are they doing ? On the WAN show they admitted and laughed about breaking twitch streams terms of service but are take money from people as a business and streaming using twitch ?

I know Linus is a tech Idiot and Luke knows a little more but its close to release and all jokes.

Also from the WAN show Luke is the security officer for floatplane or LMG or both. I didn’t catch there joking ?

People are paying money to them and bitwit is seems and there terms are ? Security is ?

I’ve looked at it and it looks good. They have put a lot of work into the security side of it too, from what I can see. It doesn’t seem to be rushed and seems to be well built.

The other stuff is just business structuring stuff, which is good. At least in the states if you don’t structure your income properly the tax man will come and treat it as if you have nearly no deductable expenses (“the standard deduction”) and then you are in for a world of hurt. Some people learn that lesson the hard way… some never learn.

Having a couple different entities is no doubt advantageous for tax reasons if nothing else.

In doing our own experiments , YouTube is to the point it doesn’t even bother sending notices for a lot of our audience. We can increase views on a video by thousands by adding it to our RSS feed, and by tweeting about it.

Floatplane will be good for established players. I’m sure they are working on notification through email, push notices, tweets and whatever messaging system then users prefer. Something that just notifies users that something is new will be huge because yt cannot be counted on to do even that.

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I can feel your pain there wendell. Just watched this today.

This is a problem and I am a patron and happy to increase it. Floatplane seem like there f’n around which they always have which worries my when people pay them on some unknown entity.

Hay you would know more than me and I actually trust L1’s crew.

I hope you get thats just the character he is putting on. Looking at the actual strategic decisions made with LMG and how he has grown the channels he knows very well what hes doing. At the moment they are keeping their cards close to their chest, but I am expecting some major surprises/announcements soon.

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No he is not. When he had done interesting stuff like unraid etc it was with their help only. Linus made his company nas with windows and 16+ drives and made a video how it wasn’t working as expected. He was a kid then sales man and a good one. But a tech idiot. Channel super fun is linus needs kids.

I hope there is some backbone and coding and security for people now paying them money. Wendell chimed in and I do trust him.

My 2 questions where who owns it and who hosts it. Just because in the last WAN show Linus said it was on Lukes NAS as one point.

They said all the info I have.

Floatplane is not about tech, its about business. As you are quite familiar with the LMG channels, you shouls also agree with me that they definitely have connections with some very knowledgeble people: a tight connection with the ppl from unraid, the 45drives ppl, wendell, etc. I hope you understand Linus is not the main backend developer of floatplane but is focussing on implementing a strategy to jump in the hole vessel left and youtube is creating.

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Who is cause Luke is the COO. I hope you understand they say there payment system is no good. I heard the new payment might be Stripe

Either way I dont care. I support L1 and will. But WAN show has been taking cam girls. nude paint art etc etc. Which will make every kid sign up. To what.

Ill wait and see. I have time.

Luke is working on it as is a whole dev team. Theres shit they aren’t saying on purpose, you realize that right?

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Yes their saying nothing right ?.

I dont want to be a troll. But there is nothing info wise.

Use the force Luke and all is well. As I said. I can wait and see. I will give it 2 months before I speak of floatplane again.

Well you sorta are but I can understand if you haven’t been following from the start.

Luke and a group of people started working on floatplane as a place to get the hell out of YT when it crashes and burns. Some of the devs want to be named, some don’t. Its a pay to view operation so there won’t be any major ads other than the normal sponsor spots so that they can run the site. A sub will be anywhere between 5 and 10 dollars for something like 2 or 3 months, but thats probably really outdated info on my part. Site security is a non-issue as they have talked about learning a lot about firewalls. Petabyte project is half LMG half FP, with some other server video’s coming soon (probably some to act as massive render farms, but I have no clue). Any other interests / questions can probably be answered with videos in the last 4-6 months.

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Lost all interest in float plane when they decided to go with a per channel subscription payment method and not a flat rate for all.

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Really depends I would think. Per channel makes some sense I guess, though it would seem pretty sensible to have a per “group” as people have multiple video channels (assuming it’s a bit like YouTube). On the other hand if your only interested in specific videos and not a whole channel it doesn’t work out as well for you.

I think “Linus is not a sysadmin” is a more accurate assessment.

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Linus is definitely more business+entertainment than tech, but he’s not technically incompetent. and it’s the “business” part that’s going to make FP succeed or fail.

business-wise, he’s NOT an idiot.

i didn’t know, prior to all this, that Luke had any background in programming. but listening to the way he talks about what works/what doesn’t/what’s coming, I’m convinced he’s at least a decent programmer. and he’s got a team of people anyway.

all in all, i don’t have any doubts on the technical nor business ends of FP. does that mean I think it’s a home run? no. but if it fails, I don’t think it will be because they’re doing anything foolishly.

this does seem like a hurdle, and a turn-off for some subscribers*… but it’s probably a better approach. it’s not all that different than patreon.

on that note, maybe they could (eventually) provide alternate subscription methods (like allowing channels to offer subscriptions as patreon rewards).

* to clarify, it’s something of a plus for me. I wouldn’t want to have to support dozens of channels just to see the one that I liked. that’s one reason I hate cable tv (a secondary reason, to be sure; but it’s there).

might be neat to offer freebies/bonuses/previews for other channels for every subscription you have. would be a good “discovery” vector.

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Not really sure what you’re saying tbh here. I think something is lost in translation.

As for the “cam girl” and body paint thing mentioned on the WAN. That was mostly a joke. They obviously aren’t going to have cam girls and porn on the platform. They were using it as an example to discuss the level of freedom they were going to offer content creators in comparison to YouTube.

They said there will be rules, and that they haven’t fully decided on content guidelines as of yet, but they are going to be relatively open and restriction free. Content creators won’t run into some of the problems they have with YouTube and their content control.

Also what? What kid is going to pay money to maybe see that when Google exists?

TBH after reading this thread, and this may not have been your intention, but it seems to me to be the standard Linus bashing that seems to be ever so popular.

They are getting a lot right with this and there are a lot of good people working on it. This isn’t some little side project or gimmick. They seem to be very dedicated to actually making this a thing and anyone putting in this much effort and attempting to challenge, even slightly, YouTube’s dominance is a good thing IMO

I’m cautiously optimistic and can’t wait to see what happens with it.

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Made an account. Zero content to test the alpha without paying money. Not paying to test an alpha site.

The point of the site is to buy access to certain channels that you want to watch so the group has stable income. ATM its set up for individual channels but it’ll be site wide I think. Something like 10 bucks.

At least LBRY has content to check it out while still a horrible UI.

I think your estimate is low. Right now, a subscription just to LMG content is $2.99/month. He has outright stated on a couple of occasions that the price is what it is because that’s what people were paying for Vessel and that (once the site launches fully) that price is going away (for new subscribers at least). He didn’t say how much it would be exactly but he intimated that it would be around double. That’s just for LMG content alone. Add at least a half-dozen other tech-tubers to the mix (plus a couple of others that have been in talks to join) and I don’t think even 20 bucks would be enough once it gets divided amongst all the channels. Dividing money in a way that everyone thinks is fair is hard, and I don’t think they want to deal with that. I think it’s much easier to have creators separate from one another. Plus that way, when the users pay for a subscription, they know that more money is going to the creator that they care about. After all, supporting creators is one of the primary purposes of Floatplane. Overall, I just get a sense that they don’t want to copy Vessel’s business model.

I’m also skeptical that an all-access subscription is coming because of some of the comments they made during the recent Logan Paul controversies. They basically said that that a similar controversy couldn’t happen on Floatplane. Firstly, for the foreseeable future, only creators with whom Linus is personally familiar or otherwise vetted will be allowed on the platform, so that rules out a lot of immature hooligans. Secondly, only those subscribed to an individual channel will be able to see any content, so that rules out anyone that isn’t already a fan of that particular channel and is already familiar with that creator’s style and content that they produce.

A few months ago they held a Floatplane Q&A after a WAN Show. They said that they haven’t ruled out the possibility of a discount when someone subscribes to multiple channels. It just won’t be before Floatplane launches officially and that each creator would have to explicitly ok a discount (i.e. they are ok with getting a bit less if the user is also subscribed to another creator they know or collaborate with). A probable situation would be something like subscribing to both Paul and Kyle you would pay something like ~$10 for both rather than say ~$6 for each individually.

Now, I may not be remembering correctly, but I vaguely remember Linus saying that individual creators can charge whatever they want above some set minimum (i.e. Floatplane’s cut of the money). Having everyone charging something different would also complicate an all-access subscription. I may have just misremembered that it was Linus that said it or if it was suggestion that someone else made to Linus. You can disregard this as it is probably fake news.

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I got all ragey cause last xmas they where teasing floatplane going live. I can be brutal.

Its time has passed and the happy happy joy joy floatplane is still coming.

I think this is a CoC example of never done.