If I'm a small company, I'd use something like BunnyCDN to stream my videos, because no one else will watch them so the benefits of Peertube are not there.
If I'm a company and I'm large I should have no problems paying for something and again would use something like BunnyCDN.
- the different formats because browsers support different stuff
- different qualities because you have to respect bandwidth visitors' bandwidth
- dynamic / adaptative quality
- CSP stuff
- nice UI for the video
etc.
At this point, PeerTube handles all this for you and it's easy to setup.
I think gp's "BunnyCDN" was shorthand for the video-as-a-service Bunny Stream: https://bunny.net/stream/
That "turnkey" managed service from Bunny would be more feature-complete for businesses than self-hosting PeerTube.
If TFA is to be believed, not PeerTube. ;P
> We needed to settle a technical debt : v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS. Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
The webtorrent always had a static http seed which is how videos played fast, but that web seed was usually more than capable of serving all the traffic. More so, it _must_ be capable of doing so because not all your clients will be able to support webtorrent effectively.
In order to use a webtorrent, you needed someone else to be watching the same exact video as you at the same time, talk to the tracker, create a p2p connection, negotiate chunks and hope the other side has those chunks.
This just never happened. Even when I tried to force ideal scenarios it was just too slow to be usable.
I did some similar experiments with IPFS and results where much better but got worse every time I revisited the tests in the months after. Then protocol-labs completely scrapped all the libraries I was using and it doesn't work at all.
At the point I'm pretty uncertain if a p2p web browser video app can exist and be usable enough to have people actually want to use it.
It's not webbrowser based but live torrent streams like acestream work really very well. Unfortunatly acestream is pretty shady and closed-source and associated with malware distribution and illegal sport streaming - but it looks like a modified python bittornado implementation. Porting this to webtorrent would be interesting as it would at least allow to share the bandwidth for live-streams. I assume from a technical point of view this is not impossible.
I'm not aware of any open source implementations for the browser.
People really need to give up on the idea that the browser is a good foundation for robust p2p protocols. There's too many restrictions and the way users conventionally interact with web pages means that running instances of the client tend to be very ephemeral, even if you design it as an SPA. WebRTC kinda works as a transport but it's still a misapplication of the technology.
What PeerTube should do now is have some kind of opt-in peering between instances to mirror each others videos and provide secondary sources to share the load, and then later build some kind of desktop client for user mirroring of content.
They've had this bit for a while:
https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#inst...
It worked really well at least at the small scale I was testing with :)
But I also wouldn't give it a name that, to the casual observer, makes it _sound_ like a rival to Twitter.
It's not in the form of any kind of principled objection to the project of building out the fediverse, any technical issue with the choice of technologies, or any affirmative argument in favor of the status quo where all this activity being captured by increasingly enshittified platforms. The motivations and the objectives are play are wrestling with important questions, and the peanut gallery thinks that talking about the first impression of the name counts as participating in that conversation, which is depressing.
> but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?
You mean apart from S3? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_GetObjec...
> Amazon S3 does not support the BitTorrent protocol in AWS Regions launched after May 30, 2016.
oh.
And thats also ignoring the elephant in the room called pricing. egress is pretty expensive on AWS, you'd at least want to use their video streaming service instead of s3 for a consumer website.
I think more to the point, the fediverse is largely anti-commercial. You -can- advertise, but risk getting defederated if you do it in a way people disapprove of. And you -can- run a walled garden, but then what are you doing running a node that supports federation (this is one thing I'm still confused about with Threads, so I'm curious how that shakes out)?
But the reason the web exploded (at least in my mental model) was because it evolved to support commerce, which then got businesses using it and users following to buy things online which was a lot more convenient than buying things in brick and mortar stores. So if the fediverse remains anti-commercial (which is the only version I'm interested in) then it will probably never get the kind of money that Web 1/2/3 has, since every evolution has been funded by commerce, so it will probably always stay niche.
There are also legitimate usability challenges, too, though. I expect those will be solved eventually, but not soon since there's no money in it and money has always been an accelerator of technical development to the point people assume tech is fast because they're so used to the massive amounts of money being poured into tech. Even when they are solved, though, I still expect the fediverse to remain niche due to the lack of commercial opportunity (and I say that as a big fan of the fediverse - as you suppose, I think it's actually to its benefit that it to some extent undoes the Eternal September).
The newer crowds are so entwined with current CDNs/Stacks that their instant dismissal to a released product is wrong.
It's common display that unless it's using some $cloud $lang its an instant dismissal of "You shouldn't do that, cloud/saas does this!"
Nowadays folk don't understand the requirements of on-perm. The cloud aids but isn't a it-all.
I meant to suggest maybe it’s useful, but more in a niche way.
For example the growth in popularity has been steady but incremental.
... the first image on the article linked here shows a monster called "Videorapter" with YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch logos, and calls for donations to "help push back Videoraptor"?
That video is likely to end up blocked by corporate users. If I'm a company I don't want to have my audience of potential customers looking things up on their lunch break reduced.
Don't visitors need to watch the same videos at the same time for this benefit to materialize?
If so, it seems unlikely for the examples you mention (promo videos, conference recordings) and so I don't know that that is an effective selling point.
here you go
If your videos include any of the verboten topics, then Youtube is not free and easy. Also they can change those topics at any time on a whim, and start retroactively removing/striking/banning. They'll drop a ban-hammer on you for multiple "violations". For example, imagine you wanted to discuss Covid 19 in any non-CDC approved way during 2020/2021? If you mentioned the Lab Leak Theory back when it was politically incorrect, or questioned the efficacy of cloth masks, your content was removed and you were given a strike. Your entire presence could be deleted, and by the time it turns out you were right (or at least possibly right), you're already disappeared.
(ftr I am sympathetic to YT because I do think there needs to be some moderation. It's a hard problem and I don't have all the answers)
Embedding youtube videos means tracking javascript for users, potentially ads for other companies showing up (if not now, later), it just doesn't seem sustainable.
Peertube seems not so good because of the overhead of federating, but the upside of course is anyone on other services like Mastodon can just add comments... no need for yet another 3rd party vendor with their own tracking javascript to handle comment threads... and people can trivially share your video on other federated services.
But it does have a lot of overhead if it's federating a lot.
It also doesn't help that, at least outside HN, every thread I see complaining about YouTube has commenters telling everyone to switch to PeerTube.
Do you have a company and do you want to self host your promotional videos? Make a PeerTube instance and embed them in your website.
Do you have a conference and want to self host the recordings? Same
Do you have an institution of any kind and want to self host the video material? Same.
Nowhere it's touted as a rival to youtube in the popularity sense, just like you wouldn't call WordPress a rival to Twitter.
And before the objections come: yes you can self host videos already, but which platforms employ the power of the torrent protocol to distribute bandwidth so you can run with minimal costs?