this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It's fundamentally unreliable.
Scalability isn't just about distribution. It's about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.
This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That's the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have...nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.
We are in the age of the toy internet, it is all about to crumple like a house of card bought on cheap credit and unviable business models. Youtube is not long for this world and nobody will miss it. The only question is how much of it Archive Team can save before if goes up in flames. Well, the good parts of it, that's easy but can we save the garbage too, I'm not sure. Take any channel on youtube and its creator can easily serve it's entire catalog out of a obsolete chromebox with two usb sticks on the side. Even as small as a terabyte would still be mostly empty space. Youtube was built defective by design using 1970s ideology, it is immensely wasteful.
I want to see how you can serve thousands or millions of people with a Chromebook in your closet. And if you say p2p, that doesn't deal with spikes in demand and a lot of old content will just vanish even easier than on YouTube. Also it would rely on people being willing to seed.
The main limitation is the 1 gigabit network. It can push out 260 3megabit streams or 50 15megabit streams at the most.
That's already an enormous amount of concurrent viewers that covers 99% of content on youtube.
To achieve this, you can't be wasting processing power anywhere, a straight copy to network from pre encoded files, no live transcoding.
No scripting, no encryption either. If you really need that, which you almost certainly don't, then install a recerse proxy on your openwrt router.
Now, if you want to scale, which almost no video really needs, then you'll send the client a script. The client is a source of inifinite scaling, compute and bandwidth.
Each client just needs to rebroadcast two streams of the file.
As excess clients connect, you tell them to get the stream from the stun/turn server. This punches through both sides of the nat. And puts two clients in communication. First client sends its copies of the received stream chunks, with preference from the beginning of the file. One client can get the stream from multiple other client and once it has a few stream chunks in the cache it can serve them to new clients.
It doesn't take many doublings before you have more bandwidth than the whole internet. All the logic for organisation, hash checking, stream block ordering etc etc is a small text file from the server, signed by the server's certificate. It runs entirely inside the client's browser.
Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.
I think YouTube will eventually end up destroying itself. It's not a profitable business model to just run some ads. The amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing power a video host requires is massive.