On: You can't play Bach on Facebook because Sony says ...

[ekianjo]

You dont have to use Youtube to host things though. Youtube is not the Internet. We should go back to decentralizing things again.

[martin-adams → ekianjo]

YouTube have the audience though. That's why people publish to YouTube if they want to tap into YouTube's massive audience.

[ekianjo → martin-adams]

Then it becomes exactly like TV. You have to live by their rules. That is not the promise of the Internet.

[tokyodude → ekianjo]

it does feel to me you do mostly have to use YouTube. I can afford to host video if it becomes remotely popular.

[ipsum2 → tokyodude]

I'm curious, how much bandwidth does a popular video take, assuming its encoded?

I picked a random Youtube video that was 5 minutes long, downloaded it in 1080p, 53MB in size. The video got 100,000 views, which takes 5TB to transfer. I'm not sure about other cloud platforms, but on DigitalOcean (I haven't found any reputable hosting thats cheaper) the transfer cost is $0.01/GB, so it would cost $53 dollars, which doesn't include CDN. If you made ate least $0.0005 per video watched, you would make up your bandwidth costs. You can probably 20x this price for CDN/other cloud providers, so if you were making at least a penny per view, you would break even.

Some simplifications made:

1) Didn't include peak bandwidth/if the pipe is big enough at peak hours.

2) Assumed all viewers watched the video from beginning to end, instead of stopping 20% of the way through.

[v_lisivka → ipsum2]

Or you can use PeerTube to distribute load among viewers if your video is hit.

[madez → v_lisivka]

Peer to peer driven distribution is underutilized. It allows indivuals to reach millions. However, if you make your money with advertisements, peer to peer distribution does not make sense.

[ekianjo → madez]

Why is that? You could do announcements in your videos and then get paid for the spread of your audience. Its not hard to imagine.

[madez → ekianjo]

How would you count views or reach?

[v_lisivka → madez]

By looking at number in lower right corner?

[true_religion → tokyodude]

Yes, it costs money to give things away for free. Now you can have YouTube do it, and play by their rules which help them keep costs low... or you can do it yourself.

Personally, I would put up a snippet, the serve a torrent. If it gets popular, its popularity will support it. Otherwise, I can support my hobby with a seed box for 15 a month.

[QasimK → true_religion]

It may even be possible to use P2P video serving directly from a web page.

[srtjstjsj → true_religion]

Or Vimeo, starting at for $7/month per 250GB of content