Better put it in a country that is not susceptible to US influence, which is about none of them. 2024 was our last fucking chance. We have a wild card in 2028 and you motherfuckers are blowing it trusting these establishment democrats, we need a white dude the talks like mandami that knows how to build and run a political machine.
The challenge is the bandwidth required is prohibitively expensive. From hyperscalers like AWS we’re talking 5-10 cents per GB of egress.
Lets do some quick math! Suppose we have a 2 hour live stream with 1000 viewers
2 hours of 720p 30fps h.264 video at 10mbps bitrate would be about 9GB. at 5 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth that’s $0.45 for each viewer who watches the whole stream.
Lets supposed 25% of viewers watched the whole stream, 25% saw an hour of it and 50% watched only 15 minutes of it
So that 2 hour stream cost the platform about $200 in bandwidth alone.
If we extrapolate this to match Hassanabi’s first YouTube stream numbers where he had around 140k concurrent viewers, and triple the length to match his normal 6 hour stream length, that comes out to a cost of about $84k in bandwidth costs alone for that single stream. The real cost is probably 2-3x that once you factor in all other infrastructure and engineering costs. Lets call it 250k for some easy math (and we’re well beyond the point of back of the envelope math making any sense). Assuming a similar stream is hosted 5 days a week, that’s a cost of 65 million dollars per year. Will Hassan pay at least $65 million in platform fees during that year? Maybe! But there’s a reason Twitch is losing money hand over fist
But lets be honest with ourselves, any open alternative to Twitch would either be so small as to be hosted on a cheap VPS setup with fixed costs or big enough to be just as bad as Twitch is about things. And since a given person has about as good a chance at winning the lottery as they do at becoming a professional streamer, we aren’t talking even a thousand viewers, we’re talking a few hundred probably at best. At that scale, peertube is a very good option (especially with its brilliant bandwidth sharing features)
TL;DR Feel free to go build your leftist alternative to Twitch on Peertube!
The only way that scales is letting viewers pay for it. It happens anyway, either through watching ads or by paying for an ad-free subscription. Why not just pay for the bandwidth you use?
Peertube seems like the most viable solution because individuals can host instances for small numbers of users keeping the collective bandwidth costs reasonable (some VPSes offer up to 1TB of bandwidth per month bundled into their contracts for example) while federation permits access to an extremely wide catalogue of content
This is one of the core features of Peertube, although it doesn’t work 100% on all browsers/devices/networks. It also necessitates sharing your IP with others in order to actually save any bandwidth for the host
We need a leftist alternative to Twitch, and fast. Seriously!
Better put it in a country that is not susceptible to US influence, which is about none of them. 2024 was our last fucking chance. We have a wild card in 2028 and you motherfuckers are blowing it trusting these establishment democrats, we need a white dude the talks like mandami that knows how to build and run a political machine.
Or figure out how to do it in a fundamentally distributed way.
PeerTube, build a video platform on I2P, something like that.
Won’t be fast or high resolution unless someone figures out an entirely new kind of video codec, but it would be much, much harder to censor.
Are you one of those electoral doomer people who thinks “we’re NOT gonna get an election in 2028”
2028 is last chance, in the succession, uphill with the cheating they are doing.
Call it doomer or no, it is the fucking truth, face it so we can meet it.
2028?
Do you think we’ll get mid terms?
Yes. But it is gerrymandered to hell for the house. Obviously half or more of states reject these democrats they offer too even without cheating.
Gee, I wonder who?
Jon stewart, as front man to take the preheat, then sean fain, uaw boss.
The challenge is the bandwidth required is prohibitively expensive. From hyperscalers like AWS we’re talking 5-10 cents per GB of egress.
Lets do some quick math! Suppose we have a 2 hour live stream with 1000 viewers
2 hours of 720p 30fps h.264 video at 10mbps bitrate would be about 9GB. at 5 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth that’s $0.45 for each viewer who watches the whole stream.
Lets supposed 25% of viewers watched the whole stream, 25% saw an hour of it and 50% watched only 15 minutes of it
250*0.45=112.5 250*0.225=56.25 250*0.05625=28.125 112.5+56.25+28.125=196.875So that 2 hour stream cost the platform about $200 in bandwidth alone.
If we extrapolate this to match Hassanabi’s first YouTube stream numbers where he had around 140k concurrent viewers, and triple the length to match his normal 6 hour stream length, that comes out to a cost of about $84k in bandwidth costs alone for that single stream. The real cost is probably 2-3x that once you factor in all other infrastructure and engineering costs. Lets call it 250k for some easy math (and we’re well beyond the point of back of the envelope math making any sense). Assuming a similar stream is hosted 5 days a week, that’s a cost of 65 million dollars per year. Will Hassan pay at least $65 million in platform fees during that year? Maybe! But there’s a reason Twitch is losing money hand over fist
But lets be honest with ourselves, any open alternative to Twitch would either be so small as to be hosted on a cheap VPS setup with fixed costs or big enough to be just as bad as Twitch is about things. And since a given person has about as good a chance at winning the lottery as they do at becoming a professional streamer, we aren’t talking even a thousand viewers, we’re talking a few hundred probably at best. At that scale, peertube is a very good option (especially with its brilliant bandwidth sharing features)
TL;DR Feel free to go build your leftist alternative to Twitch on Peertube!
The only way that scales is letting viewers pay for it. It happens anyway, either through watching ads or by paying for an ad-free subscription. Why not just pay for the bandwidth you use?
The problem is, bandwidth is simply so dang expensive that every company which hosts video content struggles with it. Netflix goes so far as to offer cache servers that ISPs can install in their networks to reduce bandwidth costs for both Netflix and the ISP, because again, bandwidth is expensive as hell!
Peertube seems like the most viable solution because individuals can host instances for small numbers of users keeping the collective bandwidth costs reasonable (some VPSes offer up to 1TB of bandwidth per month bundled into their contracts for example) while federation permits access to an extremely wide catalogue of content
So like do a stream on PeerTube?
Yup! Exactly my too long didn’t read conclusion
Maybe there could be something like torrents but for streaming, where by watching you’re forwarding that stream to others.
This is one of the core features of Peertube, although it doesn’t work 100% on all browsers/devices/networks. It also necessitates sharing your IP with others in order to actually save any bandwidth for the host
IP has Multicast built-in but its disabled on the open internet because no one every bothered to make it secure
The fact that its owned by Amazon it should be protested to oblivion.
I know an excellent leftist alternative to Twitch, it’s called Twitch.
Yeah go find some other platform devoted to a specific format and create a rats nest of grifting there.