I'm also very close to making some sort of self-hosted Twitch type thing. A lot of streamers are getting caught up in Twitch's bullshit policies. Someone I follow wore their workout clothes on stream after they finished a workout and wanted to make their normal stream time. Twitch banned her for 30 days because that's supposedly inappropriate. I think it's time to cut them out of the loop and make streaming decentralized. The type of bandwidth and compute power you need to distribute 5Mbps video to a couple thousand viewers is easily in the reach of individuals now. (10Gbps connections to the Internet can be had on the order of $1000.)

All you need is some software to run it all and a standard way of paying the streamers across the decentralized network. Probably a good application for cryptocurrency. People are crazy about their favorite streamers, and would probably be willing to learn how to use something other than a credit card to subscribe. Emotes are already decentralized with things like BTTV and FFZ. So it could work. I just don't see how I would personally make any money, so I haven't pursued it much. But the days of requiring some megacorp like Google or Amazon to be able to distribute video are over -- this area is ripe for disruption.

But I think as much as content creators love to hate on their platform, they do love the free audience. A lot of people got their start when "the algorithm" finally recognized them, and they turned their hobby into a day job. I'm not sure it could ever work with a centralized gateway that collects metadata and suggests new creators to users. But maybe it's OK if we put the money and the servers in the hands of the creators, and let discovery be an additional bonus. And maybe running that could be profitable; you get a $1 commission for sending a new subscriber their way.

I dunno, just some random thoughts... but this all sounds more and more reasonable every day. People lost access to their email for chatting in a streamer's chat. That's CRAZY.