Somewhat of a plug (apologies), but we're bootstrapping an open platform for video on top of RSS to solve this problem.
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.
> 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).
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.
It's still a bit clunky. Not every app supports every video format, and RSS doesn't cleanly do fallbacks.
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.
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/