It can play videos on (most) podcasting apps people already have on their phones. Here's an example: https://evan.streambus.com/rss/main.xml (try putting that into your podcasting app)
We make a publishing tool for it with a linear/superhuman-like interface that's free to use. Since it's just RSS, it's fundamentally open: if you want to use a different tool, or roll your own, you can do so without losing your audience. And since it's a podcast, you can piggy-back off of an already thriving ecosystem of apps, tools, distribution channels, and monetization strategies.
If you watch videos on RSS, and the app you're using puts ads on the videos, you can just use a different app. And if the video creator wants to put ads on their videos; the money is at least going to them, and not giving a 45% cut to one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
It's a bit early, but if you'd like to try it, send me an email: evan @ streambus dot com, or fill out the thing here: https://streambus.com/
What I discovered about PeerTube recently, as a Mastodon user, is that PeerTube feeds can be subscribed to / followed as any other Mastodon user. Possibly even aggregated instances (I'm still sorting out how this operates).
This ... is actually more elegant and useful than RSS in numerous regards, at least for my workflows. (Though a flipside view might be that Mastodon / the Fediverse is more addictive and a greater timesuck).
But the ability to be notified of new content from within what's a primary social channel is pretty compelling. My RSS reader(s) by contrast seem to be higher-friction / higher-frustration (there are many, many, many poorly-structured or poorly-utilised feeds, I should of course weed those out, that ... seems like more work than it's worth).
The problem that direct access is seen as remunerative (that is: hitting a website directly), whilst various syndication channels are seen as appropriating value from the sites is also problematic. It's endemic to both advertising and surveillance-capitalism based monetisation, and is yet another case of how such practices when widely adopted actively destroy useful tools and platforms.
I mostly agree with you on this. In fact, this concept somewhat came from a fediverse/activity_pub thing I was working on awhile ago: https://github.com/pubcast/pubcast
The concept of having an "inbox" and "outbox" and then just interlacing with everyone else really hits that part of my brain.
Our goal right now is to create a publishing platform that smooths over some of these hiccups (for example, generating backwards-compatible RSS links for each app), as well as creating incentives for apps to coalesce around HLS/m3u8 natively.
Unsurprisingly, YouTube only follows the big money so they know that they cannot and will never change. Creators become victims to the recommendation algorithm and compete against viewership governed by 'The Algorithm'.
For those who are after monetisation on YouTube, It can best described as shooting a video on a tight-rope, blind folded and surrounded by thousands of snakes and crocodiles on a daily basis.
One slip up, wrong move or silly sound and your account could be demonetised, permanently banned or both. That's doesn't seem like 'freedom' as YouTube describes it. [0]
If you don’t want ads to appear on your videos, you can host the videos on your own website and pay for the data or use another video service. Neither are likely to give the streaming performance or audience you’d get with YouTube.
[1] https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube
Is there Invidious-native content?
(Mind: the proxy feature is quite usfeul. It's also ... limited and limiting.)
Invidious is useful for more than just filtering out ads, it actually makes Youtube content useable on older hardware - like the Thinkpad T42p I'm using right now - where the "official" interface and player are close to useless. When configured correctly - i.e. when videos are proxied through the server - it keeps your video viewing habits out of Google's hands. It makes it possible to follow channels without Google knowing about it. It can not help against censorship, when Google removes content it can no longer be accessed through Invidious. I've used Peertube to mirror Youtube channels which have had videos removed which does help against censorship - run a cron job to monitor a channel for changes and mirror new videos to Peertube. All of this can be done anonymously - I do not even have a Google or Youtube account.
The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used:
- Runs without any browser at all.
- From a console.
- Without video, if you so specify.
- Enables full search, can be limited to music, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.
- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.
- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.
- Content can be downloaded if preferred.
- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.
YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and largely succeeded. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.
[1] ...cue audio from that ancient C64 game: Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER... https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Impossible_Mission
Agreed.
But they didn’t do this until after providing you with the option to pay for ad-free.
If ads bother you that much really, just put up and pay for it. Your problem will be solved across all your machines, devices, phones, tablets and TVs in less than a minute.
A better solution is to move away from YouTube, if at all possible.
To find out about Premium I have to go to my channel-> Purchases and memberships->Read More
I could buy the search monopoly position, but not video.
If you are trying to reach a larger and larger audience beyond your own abilities to stream, it sounds like you yourself are advertising. So you are annoyed that the advertising firm you use to advertise is using your advertisement to advertise.
Discoverability is good for advertising. It seems odd that people complain about ads on a service they use for advertising.
You understand the costs involved to serve billions of hours of video a day yet still block the ads used to help sustain the site?
Why not pay for premium?
At this point I am fully convinced even cable tv has a better signal to noise ratio.
Then there's also the non-dollar cost of the access to the very sizeable YouTube audience that google curates.
Comparing the cost of the actual hosting is silly though. Nobody thinks the value of hosting the nyt cooking site comes from the engineering behind the website, it comes from the content stored. The exact same. Thing is true here, the value of your video being on youtube is it being in a storefront.
Is the video served from some datacenter in Germany, no matter where the user is? You can cut bandwidth costs and improve latency by caching videos closer to the users, at the cost of handling all of the caching complexity and business arrangements.
If video 6-of-15 in the tutorial series suddenly goes viral, are you on the hook for outlandish bandwidth charges, or does your site hit a quota and just die?
Overall, it's VERY understandable that businesses outsource the complexity of video hosting, based on the engineering complexity alone.
No. Those estimates are 1 order of magnitude wrong. You wouldnt even pay that much contracting the highest tiers in AWS/Azure/GC , let alone owning the infrastructure.
Or you mean using users’ bandwidth and storage to power the service? That might go over less well than you think.
One is that subscribing to YT Premium will get rid of all the ads. (You can’t get rid of sponsor shoutouts with Premium, though.) From the data that YouTube gives me, only a tiny fraction of my revenue comes from Premium users. I assume this means only a tiny fraction of users have Premium.
Second, if you are in YPP (monetized channel), you can choose which videos have ads and when the ads appear. One workaround I’ve seen people use is to get accepted into YPP and then use that to turn off ads. The Zig channel would qualify given its viewership.
Not advocating for one way over another, just wanted to add info.
Youtubers also get far more money from premium views than normal views.
Ironically, most of the complains people have with youtube are derived directly or indirectly from the fact that the platform is ad-supported. Youtube doesn't care that your video is offensive, but advertisers do. Every demonetization wave was preceded by a mass of people putting pressure on them (eg. NYT "journalists" literally searching for isis videos, taking screenshots and telling the companies with ads next to them that they will be listed in their article if they don't stop doing business with youtube)
It doesn't get rid of tracking, and it doesn't get rid of the eternal problem of Youtube's recommendation engine. However blocking ads, cookies, and several key scripts on Youtube does seem to get Youtube to at least stop constantly customizing things for me. Maybe it's gotten better now, but Youtube was also constantly trying to get me to watch exclusive videos, so it wasn't even actually getting rid of ads, just ads inside videos. It promised the ability to download videos, but they were locked in a weird format on Android and periodically deleted themselves or errored out, they were completely unreliable. Their app also used something like twice the battery of NewPipe, a program that (for viewers) seems to do literally everything their app does but better.
The final kind of insult to injury was that I found out that if I was signed into Youtube on both my desktop and on my phone, it would block me if I tried to play videos on both at the same time, which... nothing else has that problem. I don't have that problem when I'm blocking ads, I can watch videos on as many devices as I want. Logging into Youtube shouldn't give me a worse experience than logging out of it.
I eventually gave up because I was paying Google $10 a month, and then signing out of my account and using UBlock Origin to watch videos. So none of that was going to the creators I wanted to support, and I just didn't see the point anymore. For a while it was getting bundled with Google Play Music, which was at least something, but even that ended and now they have Youtube Music or whatever. So I dropped Youtube Premium and just started giving people money on Patreon instead. It's more direct, it's more valuable to them, it's a better experience for me, and I get very slightly better privacy.
It's not necessarily that people are unwilling to pay, it's that the service is bad. Even if Youtube Premium was free I wouldn't use it. If Ublock Origin and NewPipe were $15 a month, they would still be a better deal than Youtube Premium was at the time I was subscribed.
Now, that of course doesn't apply if a copyright holder is claiming your ad revenue. But my researched back then is that yes, it does mean you still get paid for "advertiser-unfriendly" content.
So privately owned companies can be directly controlled by their owners in proportion to the amount of ownership. Publicly owned companies cannot usually be directly controlled by their owners, but can be indirectly controlled in proportion to the political power of the owner.
In a private company, you have no chance of appeal. In a government, you at least have elections. The worst most corrosive parts of our government come from its contact with the wealthy and the corporate sector and those aspiring to become them.
In theory I wanna agree with you, but in practice, "representative bodies" often represent their corporate masters far more than they do the will of the people.
They will offer way more money than you can offer for the service.
It’s hard work to make content, many channels are run full time. I know people hate ads, and if that’s the case, just pay for Premium.
My client, my computers, my rules.
They're being secretive about exactly how that split works.
There's also the point that pretty much every time a paywalled article is posted here, someone will inevitably post some work around to the paywall.
I will sometimes user NewPipe even to view their videos though. The Android app needs work.
How much of that is hosting, and how much is content?
And we gave it all to them, for the price of the convince of using their service.
Recently, some people were trying to tell me that ads are entirely controlled by the video uploader, when I brought up some videos that clearly had way more ads than any content creator would reasonably allow.
Some Youtubers talk shop on their channels. I have learnt from them that this is not the case. Even if a Youtuber is very meticulous about placing and restricting the ads (e.g. two mid-rolls), sometimes the software "forgets" and goes full ad blast on the viewer (one pre-roll and six mid-rolls). The cynic's interpretation would be that this happens on purpose.
Once I do have the watch-time (4000 hours per year) to monetize, I will feel sleazy about it but I don't think it would make any difference to viewers, I'll just be taking the pennies I deserve.
Oh, wait, you mean you can't monetize without exerting some actual effort? How is that Youtube's fault?
(disclaimer- I work for the Goog)
There were some other creators that I saw some less egregious but still questionable cadences with, which I thought would go against their general ethos (like ads every five minutes on an hour long video by a person who is generally against a culture of over-capitalization).
Maybe A/B tests?
JFTR, Eric Buijs[0] (author of mentioned SolveSpace video tutorials) moved to PeerTube[1] few years ago:
> I do hope that people, that love their privacy and want to control their content, will follow me and start uploading great content to PeerTube for this is the only way to get out of the YouTube stranglehold. To get you started I’ve made a list of some useful links. See you on PeerTube.
P.S. Follow Eric & me on Mastodon if you are interested in showcases of SolveSpace app, a free & open-source 2D/3D CAD software.[2,3]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=homehack.nl
[1] https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/
I don't get any ads at all. Ever. Other than those "sponsorships" that are just as annoying.
My friends will not even host the torrent that they just downloaded for a single hour and my family don't know what torrent is and more important than that, they don't care. Good luck with really large scale p2p solutions. You must be really happy paying 100 bucks on fees to transfer 10 dollars on the Bitcoin or ETH networks, but hey! no adds or "evil" companies!
Ad blocking it's just a feature.
Or... you could route around Youtube completely. Why do you use a service with which you are unfriendly?
YouTube is an amazing collection of knowledge, but it's unfortunate that it's in the hands of an entity whose primary goal and motivation is avarice. A degradation of the experience over time seems inevitable.
How to organize human endeavors in a way that captures the innovation and superbly focused effort of early-stage companies without devolving into the raw exploitation, rent-seeking, and monopolistic behavior of late-stage companies seems an open problem.