this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Sure, but you're assuming all content is on one server. With something like PeerTube, content is federated.
That said, I don't think federation is the solution here because a popular video is going to completely swamp that instance, but something P2P would probably work if you can stream from multiple seeders. Even if you copy like we do w/ Lemmy, you'd still end up with a handful of instances that are way more popular than the rest and those would get hammered if there's a particularly popular video.
If you can spread that $6B (ignoring bandwidth here) over 10M people, you end up with a very reasonable $600/year, and costs would go down as more people join the network. I also assume a lot of that is duplication to handle demand spikes, which is baked in to the P2P system, so a P2P system would probably be way cheaper to scale up.
If you read the links, this includes their server clusters and employees across the entire world all doing complex load balancing and maintenance.
Sure, and none of that is necessary with a proper P2P system. If I'm torrenting something, it'll naturally pull from seeders near me over seeders on the other side of the planet, so load balancing happens by every client being greedy.
The complex load balancing is only necessary because it's a centralized service.
This protocol already exists and so does the system, PeerTube.
Why no significant quantity of people use it is apparent after you try it for a while; the entire server system cannot handle the commensurate volume of content and interactions that YouTube is popular for.
I thought PeerTube's problem was largely federation (need to know which servers to use), which results in making it hard to find content to watch and probably has something to do with how load balancing works (i.e. are you mostly streaming from your instance?). I think Lemmy has a similar problem, but it's at least pretty fast because text and images are a lot easier to manage than video.
Which is, in fact, exactly how PeerTube works: it's got BitTorrent built right into it.
Frankly, it's ridiculous how people keep harping on this "problem" as if it isn't long since solved.
I thought it was largely federated? I don't know how the internals work, so I don't know what group of peers it'll pull from.
Regardless, the problem PeerTube has little to do with its technical foundation IMO, but the network effect. If we get people to start using it, either we'll fix it or we'll develop something better, but getting creators to move is the first step.