Had this idea for a couple years now, and I am curious if other people have had the same idea / or if there is a product out there that is similar. The idea is this, with all the nonsense that YouTube and MCNs pull with regards to copyright claims and with the general demonetization of videos. Would it be possible to make an application that would essentially tile or create a mosaic for videos to be uploaded to YouTube, and at the same time have a plugin that could reverse this mosaic on the fly. Essentially making a poor-mans encryption with the idea being that it will still resemble a normal YouTube video to the algorithm, but preventing said algorithm from content striking videos. The level or intensity of the pattern could be changed / altered from the creators side and the creator could share a hash or series of characters, either on YouTube, aka video description, or on other sites such as discord or twitter if they want to restrict their videos to the most “loyal” fans only. The web browser plugin could be set to look for a hash in the description automatically via some pattern recognition. You could even have the clients be able to subscribe to and fetch hash keys from rss feeds automatically.
This does get a little more complicated when talking about audio bc you would have to decrypt the buffer on the video ahead of time, whereas the video could just be an overlay.
I am not a coder so I have no idea as to the level of difficulty that software like this would require.
Thoughts? Ideas?
Even if this was technically feasible, YouTube would never allow this, because it would immediately become used for distribution of illegal content (child pornography, etc).
It’d be better to invest the time into an alternate distribution platform, or deliver the videos encrypted, via p2p methods.
I agree a P2P base CDN would be the best alternative, but i just don’t see any other platform getting even a fraction of the traffic that YouTube does, and it will take a lot of R&D to make a platform that can monetize videos at the same rate that YouTube does. That being said I have suggested a P2P alternative as the load on a central server is low bc all its handling is statistics, comments, video info and recommendation feeds, as well as a tracker for the P2P network.
I was trying to think of a way modify the current platform to better serve the creators. I would also like to point out that if the channel was distributing illegal content, people could still flag the channel and get it taken down. Its not particularly hard to reverse engineer, its just trying to make it a little harder for bots to find fair use content.
Thanks for the feedback