If everyone downloads once and serves twice, then you can reach every human in about 30 iterations.

If you want to prevent client storage because you want to create a repeated controllable attention resource, then you will have a scaling problem.

(It's too bad you can distribute everything as a torrent and give people an easy way to pay for the movie they just downloaded, even if it was just "on their honor".)

Getting 1 video to a billion people is dead simple, getting a million videos to 1,000 people is damn hard. YouTube serves both ends of the spectrum.

Really good points raised here guys. Here's my take on each point raised: 1) Appeal to viewers: it's slick, no clutter, really fun, and people hate YouTube. There's lots of appeal already just based on the reaction I've gotten posting it around a bit. 2) NodeTube has built in integration with Stripe where you can offer a 'plus' version of the site for $5/month. $5/month gets a LOT of hosting bang for your buck, so the bet is that your Plus subscriptions will outpace your hosting costs, I feel quite confident in that. 3) Regarding a video that may sit on the platform for a long time with zero views, my suggestion would be in that case since the file is serving the purposes more of being backed up rather than serving as content that you would prompt the user to pay a fee for using NodeTube as a 'backup service'. It seems harsh but if profitability is important to the project then you would remove those uploads that satisfy a condition that basically marks them as 'totally inactive, only using the platform as a content backup'. Interested to hear your guys thoughts on this concept.

Thanks guys!

> people hate YouTube.

Do they? In my bubble, that's certainly a very uncommon sentiment from the consumer side.

My honest opinion is yes. Look at how disliked the Rewind videos are, or how much flack YouTube gets on Twitter. Susan Wojicki is not looked on with much fan fare.

My honest opinion is that that's an opinion that might have arisen in a bubble, considering that multiple, actually mature alternatives to YouTube exist and yet its content and userbase continue to grow at a frankly alarming rate. It's like how a lot of people on here seem so certain that Facebook is a dead platform that nobody sane uses and everybody hates, when its number of _daily_ active users ranks in the billions.

I think part of that is people not recognizing the difference between "I hate this platform, as in I will actually put my money where my mouth is and leave or boycott it at the slightest provocation" and "I hate this platform, as in I grumble about it because pretty much every hugely successful venture has everyone grumbling about one thing or the other, but my net feelings towards it are actually rather positive and I have no intentions of leaving it".

Exactly, there's a reason why no one is competing with youtube.

Would ads that don't track users sell?

Even if you could sell ads as well as YouTube, you will neither have Google's scale or technological advantages, nor will you be able to survive on the same margin as YouTube. But off course, any YouTube competitor will most likely receive far less from ads than YouTube does (not counting things like facebook video here).

If we ever want to have a better YouTube alternative, I think the main question is would people be willing to pay a good amount of money for that service. Personally, I find the YouTube model better. Even though it tracks people, it atleast makes videos freely accessible to everyone. Would something like khan academy or OCW even exist without YouTube?.

However, I have observed that as one progress through the social ladder economically, the appetite for a paid but non tracking model grows.

Most individuals have gotten very accustomed to largely not paying (directly) for hosted content/email/etc.

This isn't universal. There are relatively niche sites that people pay to use, or at least have paid tiers. But free is what most people expect. (Look at all the outrage when SmugMug eliminated the 1TB free limit that Yahoo put on Flickr.)

My take is you go the freemium model. Free version of NodeTube gets you cool features, but if you want really epic features (livestreaming, increased file uploads, private/unlisted uploads) then you have to pay a bit. My bet is that people will get behind the project and pay a bit of extra money on a freemium model to access the extra features and support the NodeTube instance.