Floatplane – Linus Tech Tips launches their own video hosting platform
floatplane.com
floatplane.com
"Good looking" is far from the most important thing in a web site like this. But it is hard to argue it isn't relevant.
Once you view a stream the only things you see are the video player, details about the streamer, and chat.
Not sure what you imagine could be better, but if you want to know what really bad UI looks like, check out Mixer.
Floatplane has made a very conscious decision not to influence the user's decisions on consuming content; there's no algorithm, recommended videos, or trending page. you just have access to the videos of people you want to support.
In that sense -as others have mentioned-, it's functionality much closer to a 'Video Patreon' than it is to say, a youtube alternative (AAMOF they've explicitly mentioned that several times)
When seen through that lens, it becomes apparent that "looking good" isn't really all that relevant, I mean, would the way patreon looks prevent you from supporting your favorite creator? probably not.
PS: Of course I get that good UI/UX is a must these days, my point is that they probably have much higher priority (not to mention mission-critical) tasks on their to-do list right now.
edit: or wait, maybe there is content on here but you need to sign in to view any of it? if that's the case it's not very clear.
As a viewer, i have no idea what i'm supposed to do on this site.
Essentially, Floatplane is a fail over for Youtube. It's not there to replace it, it's there to supplement it and be there in case it disappear. That means that it will never be your source to discover someone, but it will be your source to subscribe to someone that you discovered somewhere else. It's closer to Patreon in that regard (though I believe they still have a bit of discoverability, but it's certainly not your source for that).
That means that most of their function will be geared toward creator, and allow them to offer something more to their viewer (but that for sure will require an account and a paid subscription). One of their interesting current feature for example is to allow streaming to multiple platform (Floatplane, Twitch and Youtube) in parallel.
I was also extremely confused looking at it - I wasn't even sure whether I was signing up as a creator or a viewer. Then I signed up and got in and was presented with nothing except a bunch of locked content. I had watched the video on the launch and still had no idea that it was a pay-per-month thing. I'm not against that at all - I just didn't know.
I'm extremely glad Floatplane exists. YouTube is changing for the worse IMHO - at least I no longer feel like I'm their target audience.
I hope the Floatplane guys are reading this and other places and taking all this feedback in. I'm really excited to watch this one; I can see the end of YouTube, at least as a viewer and I'm glad that people are starting to build and consider alternatives.
Their site is light on details, but the TOS spells it out pretty well: https://www.floatplane.com/legal/terms
Patreon is fine as a donation platform, but it's mediocre for content delivery.
As a long-time viewer of LTT, I also trust them more with their content moderation policies.
I'm not seeing a live demo of their player.
One of the main advantages that I've heard people talk about is the high bit rates, making their 1080p look smoother than YouTube 4k in some cases.
Somewhat strange that they lack a free video preview of the quality of the website, but that might just be because launching a service like this with a high quality video front and center might ruin their networking when a giant wave of new people come in.
I think another reason was Youtube did not support uploading of HEVC content until fairly recently, that has cause lot of problem especially those shoot their video with their iPhone.
And Youtube may never transcode and support the playback of HEVC content. Which means you are stuck with 1080P for Apple's users.
Anecdotally, videos streamed from Vimeo (which offers far superior bitrates to YouTube) look considerably better than YouTube.
As for HEVC, not supporting is makes sense. The cost of licensing all of Youtube's encoder and decoder systems would probably make a small dent in server cost; more than storage for H.264 content of the same length and quality would cost. For example, some versions of H.265 have a $0.02 cost per disc/title. Serving 5 billion videos (titles) each day, such a codec could easily sink the company. Of course, this is just one example of the codec licensing, and the pricing depends per region (which adds another layer of paperwork) so real pricing won't be that steep, but it's not going to be cheap to switch to HEVC playback.
Youtube has moved to VP9 and is seemingly going for AV1 as its preferred future video codec. VP9 and HEVC are pretty close when it comes to compression performance in many real world videos.
I honestly did know or even expect that Apple devices don't support VP9, but I don't blame Google for sticking to an open codec instead of giving in to Apple and their bet on HEVC for corporate contacts, especially when the codecs are this close in regards to performance.
If that's the case, they're not up to the task of hosting a video that goes viral.
Whatever the explanation, the absence of a demo video leaves a very bad impression.
This is not a free video hosting website, this is only allowing paid subscription. If something goes viral enough enough paid subscriber watch it, I'm pretty sure that the amount paid by theses subscribers will be more than enough to support that wave. Having more channels will certainly make theses peaks smaller too, and that will only happens once they grow bigger.
Nebula is probably fine if you have a large pre-existing and engaged subscription base. However, it's probably more difficult for smaller to mid-sized creators. I would worry that they're not going to get enough revenue from their share of watch time to cover their own costs. Also given that Nebula is very heavily skewed education channels, you'd likely have trouble if you're outside of that realm.
Floatplane on the other hand seems more targeted: you pay for a specific content creator. This seems more similar to how places like Rooster Teeth operated in the early days, only it's now providing the video streaming as-a-service.
Nebula will likely provide discoverability within their catalog of creators in return for the shared revenue model. Floatplane is way more direct but you're left growing your subscriber base outside of the platform.
Edit: fixed some typos
As a different comparison point, HBO NOW is $15/month and that gets you a very small amount of content.
Rather than paying a fee to Netflix let's just make our own and what you end up with is 100s of providers that have 1 or 2 things you actually want to watch.
I can understand how you might look at it that way, but I guess it depends on how you define value. To an investor, no of course not... one youtube channel could never have the same asset value as half of the content on netflix.
But, if you're talking about personal value, emotional value, qualitative value, I don't think you can speak in terms of asset value. A super fan doesn't care how much the content cost to produce or the variety of that content, in fact they want more of that one type of content than anything else. Most people have something they are irrational fanatical about and would pay more than $5/month to consume/learn/see everything about that thing. It's about a feeling and that feeling is often worth more than $5/month.
That also doesn't include content that has real monetary value to consumers. For example, there is one stock related youtube channel I follow that charges $8/month for access to their private stock picks, analysis, etc. If that helps someone generate a 1% gain in their portfolio growth then that could very well be worth more than the content on netflix to that one consumer since the content on Netflix costs them more than it makes them.
So, I think it's fair to say that someone may like one show or creator half as much as they like the content on Netflix even though the asset value could never compare.
The site seems to be at a beta stage at the moment and they are probably letting creators in very slowly so I would hold off if your intention is to completely replace YouTube.
It's not meant for random individuals to post their cat videos and make a quick buck, it's a monetization option for popular people/communities that gives them more revenue streams, which is great if it gets them out of the fist of Google/Amazon. Having 80% of your revenue tied to a mega-corp's ad rate is a big incentive to diversify...
I can't find any statistics for twitch subs easily, but it seems like "modestly popular" in your view equates to a very tiny percentage of streamers.
One thing not being mentioned much in the comments are the nuances of a subscription-only model. People who don't like the content will simply never see it, they've stated themselves that as long as it's not explicitly illegal (child pornography, weapons manufacturing, etc) they'll allow any creator onto the platform. Although we have yet to see it tested, what happens when a publicly loathed far-right community sets up shop there...
It's useless to you, yes. Floatplane is a way for established video creators to acquire a more stable revenue stream and for viewers to support their preferred video creators without being subject to ads.
It's not a place for creators to find a new audience. It's not a place for new creators to build an audience. It's basically a replacement for Vessel - more like an alternative to Patreon than YouTube.
> I'm not at all interested in starting multiple subscriptions at $5 a months for these two-bit channels. $1 per channel is a massive flex, but $5 is like some fantasy world flex.
Correct. Floatplane gives users an option to pay for a premium viewing experience (better video quality, cleaner UI, better comments) while supporting their favorite creators. However, it's not an alternative to YouTube. Video creators can (and should) still use other platforms like YouTube to sustain and expand their audience.
Wow, that's a hard pass then...
https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms
no hits for "arbit"(ration)
I expected YouTube to have an arbitration class myself but as it probably didn't have one from the start and the extra stink of adding it now would only serve to make people more hostile to the platform, adding it probably doesn't make sense..
Most (American) Internet companies do have an arbitration clause though so I can see where the parent comes from. It's expected to be in the terms of any web company these days.
So, yeah, not at all universal
Do you prefer litigating?
Do you think it's better for consumers?
Do you think it's better for the business?
As a user I would rather be able to sue in small claims court.
As a creator I wouldn't want to have the threat of unlimited extra costs if I have to sue.
Competition in this space is hard and is always welcomed, in my opinion.
So I wish them well with this new venture
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA [2] https://youtu.be/oOOOfZWXPu4?t=71
Think of nazi propaganda, animal abuse or other freaky shit.
And yes, the lines are blurry.
If your content is against the law, or does not conform to the guidelines that where written in the terms of use, it will be removed.
And for the guidelines: A Guideline change will be communicated at least half a year before the changes
This gives people ample time to other plattforms or move videos.
EDIT:
And of course if you are a repeate offender you get banned for X weeks/months/years,
or you have to have a manuall review on each update which raises your fees.
To provide a service for the vast majority you need powerful legal tools against the small, but smart devious users. Strict wording is part of this never ending battle.
At YouTube scale it's very hard and injustice is baked into the system. With a service like Floatplane, you can police it fairly easily. To a point... :) Then they will start to feel the heat.
My idea binds them to certain terms e.g. they can only ban accounts if they don't follow guidelines,which means they have to give a reason which can be legally challenged.
They can only change the guidelines after a warning period, which means they have more incentitive to be constructive with the community as they can move away in that time.
As of now, if you join the plattform you only have very few gurantees.
As per the terms right now, they could happily send you an E-Mail at around 1AM and change pledge fees to 300%.
If that lands in the spam folder, you could not notice it until you have to pay.
Then they could ban you and delete your account without any reason, without any refunds.
Do I think they will do it? No
Do I think a company which presents itself as a fair new company who wants to be fair etc. should have terms of use which enable such behaivour?
No, I think it is high time that such terms of use are banned. I'm not even sure such terms would be legal in some countries.
Perhaps you instead mean neo-nazi propaganda or that belonging to some other political group that isn't wholly defunct.
- Binding arbitration in Canada where the loser pays all costs.
- They can increase "Pledge fees" arbitrarily with just a single email notifying you
- All monthly/yearly payments are non-refundable, with no partial credit returned. So if a creator deletes their account or simply blocks you, you lose access and don't get any money back. If they refund you (extraordinary circumstances), it's only as credit.
- When payments are delayed to Creators they will "try" to communicate the reason.
- They will "try" to make payments "timely"#
- They have catch-all consent for communication, can't opt out of spam.
Would you be willing to work for your employer if they also guaranteed that your salary will never go up? Because that and a guarantee from all vendors the company uses would be needed.
And are there companies out there that don't include required arbitration? Anyone that is setting up a huge one-to-many relationship has to cover their but. The fact that any or all of your users could sue you in court at any time creates a very risky business.
Torrents provide a lot of this funcitonality
(Also, the CDN doesn't even make sense for youtube - they are not profitable)
Plenty of companies have tried to build peer-to-peer CDNs (including Bittorrent, Inc. itself). They have all failed.
P2P doesn't work well on mobile, ISPs get super upset about seeding from residential connections (and often use boxes to traffic shape it), there is no programatic way to determine if even a residential line is on a pay-per-use plan, and in general consumers don't like you using "their bandwidth."
and ISPs might adapt to increased demand, fixing their stingy upload rates
Adaptive bitrate streaming?
That strikes me as the real acid test as to whether you have a serious video streaming platform, or a generic file-distribution platform.
I think it’s more of a Patreon alternative focused on delivering video.
* Creators are curated and are seeded from existing Youtube channels. Curation happens on the creator level where illegal content means removal of the channel.
* No advertising so latitude for monetization of brand-unfriendly content.
* User pay a monthly subscription fee.
* Money is divided amongst creators based on watch time.
Some ideas I had that I don't see represented:
* Users have the opportunity to pay more per month and can elect to spend this money in a discretionary way, like a "tip". This isn't shared based on watch time but by direct action from the user towards creators they want to show appreciation above and beyond.
* Creators can elect some of their content as "free" content, e.g. introductory videos, videos older than 3 months, etc. in order to attract and grow an audience. This free content does not contribute to their "watch-time" that comprises their share of subscription revenue but it can attract discretionary tips.
A couple of points:
* Anyone who scoffs at the idea of the discretionary monthly "tip" idea has not watched the flood of donations to Twitch streamers. However, some kind of feedback would be required in a similar way to TTS shoutouts - I'm not sure on this. We tend to focus on the majority who say "I would never pay $Y for anything!" while ignoring the whales that would happily pay $Y * 100 given the right incentives. If you've worked in free-to-play games then you know the revenue potential of whales. If you remove the ceiling of what people can pay, some people will pay above your wildest expectations just because they can.
* I worked in video distribution and I was closely involved in managing costs. Most people cannot believe the costs involved in delivering video. Linus mentioned terabytes of data but that is the tip of the iceberg for popular content. Costs can ramp up to $100k/month for even modest audience sizes when storage and delivery are considered. That doesn't include server costs to run the multiple back-end and front-end services needed, nor the salaries of engineers and devops to keep it up. I was unable to find a way to make the $$ work without serious up-front investment. This isn't a space you can bootstrap on free tiers of cloud services.
Ultimately the real "whales" are businesses. I don't believe any subscriber funded effort can ever attract the kind of spend that massive advertising budgets can leverage. That means that platforms funded by advertising will always have a war-chest to snipe the best content creators. Think how Mix payed for Ninja and Shroud. Even if a content creator gets popular on one of these subscriber-supported platforms there will always be an advertising platform ready with cash-in-hand to steal them away.
Despite some pessimism, I am actually very bullish on this idea and I truly hope the idea succeeds!
https://i.imgur.com/RWqwd0P.png
Thank you,
-- someone who thinks selecting text is not something you should screw with.
/s
Think of all the CPU cycles on all hardware (clients + network devices) and energy used just to fetch web "content" these days.
Might as well return to just burning coal at home to keep warm, thinking of the net effect on the environment.
It's absolutely stupid.
I used a ~$50 android and pre-paid plans for over a year while traveling Latin America. Wast swaths of the internet are basically inaccessible unless you have tremendous patience and nerves as well as leftover money to throw at the ISPs.
Imagine having to download an app update every time someone merged to master. That’s most SPAs.
Still, if the deployment system involves frequent node module updates, the vendor files get "dirty" quickly, too.
If the library you use to build your SPA (React, Vue, etc.) is relatively up to date you should also probably not be sending the whole app over the wire at once to anyone. Routes and components can be set to only load when the user actually attempts to access them inside the SPA, reducing egress significantly.
There are legitimate use cases; the classic being 'sort a table by clicking on a column heading', where without 'user-select: none;' (or some other mitigation) the column heading will often end up being selected. Often when one creates a site that involves users interacting with text using a traditional pointer device outside of form controls a need for this will appear.
These users buy gifts for their friends and families. Sometimes they even buy groceries for themselves.
That makes these users your potential customers.
Traversing the web for them is already remarkably difficult, but they do it to buy things for their loved ones.
When they traverse the web they do so using a multitude of tools including specialised screen readers or keyboard and mouse controllers.
Do you know what these users do when they come across your super-aesthetic futuristic website and you hijack the selection functionality for their screen reader? They just bounce to another site or service where selection works.
If your site sells something but has been designed for aesthetics only (hijacking the scroll function, removing indicators of selection, disabling right-click functionality etc) you are excluding almost anyone over 50 (that suffers from low vision) and EVERYONE with accessibility requirements. Don't do it.
Amazing design is being able to make something aesthetically gorgeous, while also meeting or exceeding as much of the WCAG guidelines as possible.
WCAG Guidelines https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Source: We're an accessibility accredited and audited design agency.
Thankfully floatplane doesn't seem to change any of that but you can't scroll with Vimium's [udjk] keys which kinda sucks.
I also have these issues with Vim plugins - suddenly websites make scrolling almost unusable with an animation(which is never seen when scrolling with a mouse, touchpad etc. but seems to exist solely to annoy keyboard users), or they can't be scrolled at all, or the whole website UI is built with crazy JS magic so that the plugin can't even find a single link on the whole page.
I don't want to know how bad it must be for blind people who have to rely on automatic tools.
"user-select" should be disabled more specifically than it is in this case, for sure, but that is what I suspect is really going on here.
Agree in this case; really bad idea to not let people select text on whole like that.
There are tons of of cases, however, where not allowing selected text is totally a good behavior in UI.
Which should also be avoided
- Widget labels (time, short text, etc)
- Buttons, when text is just an arrow >
(I know, just use <button>) :)
- Navigation, but that might be bad too
Good going.
Also video controls that use the UNICODE characters for e.g. play/pause/stop/etc instead of graphic icons (so it scales better at higher DPI). You don't want people to be able to select the text inside the button when pushing the button.
There's actually tons of great usage of user-select: none. This is definitely not one of them though.
I wonder about what kind of a performance decrease you'd expect from being able to blacklist or whitelist chunks of the web API, like how you can blacklist syscalls in some container platforms.
Are they run-time prefs that can be toggled? There is UI/UX overhead, and related attack surface.
If they are run-time prefs, are they loaded when the browser is run, or on each page load/content type load? Do you have to maintain a list of prefs by domain? etc, etc, etc.
If they are compile time, then is it even worth doing for dramatic increase in complexity trying to support users with unusual configuration (e.g. THAT user that decides that preffing off JSON support is a good idea.)
How granular do you allow user prefs on this, and how do you account for the fact that a user may pref off an api/feature that you use as a part of exploit mitigation?
Do you want to log entries that are pref'd off so that users know what is making their favorite app fail?
What are the abuse cases for pref'd features?
How much attack surface is introduced by allowing pref'ing of features?
Does doing this actually contribute to usability on the web, or will it simply lead to a proliferation of "Please ensure that all features are pref'd on" pages, similar to the Javascript pages you often see when browsing without javascript.
Which is also hostile. Why not use something like an img/svg?
If you think it shouldn't be possible to develop user interfaces that rival the desktop inside the browser, then just say so. If you merely believe existing web standards make this possible without "hacks" like "user-select:none", then you are mistaken.
By the way, I'm a "read with selection" guy myself and I find this behavior on paragraphs of text unacceptable. On the other hand, none of the text on that website is worth reading anyway.
I gave you several examples of these. The text for many UI elements isn't supposed to be selectable, because it interferes with user interaction.
Your off-chance example where somebody is trying to copy-paste the text for translation because the application is in a foreign language is subordinate to this.
Good UX is about choosing the right tradeoffs between functionality and usability.
It would make sense, and all text in a user interface should be user selectable and offer the same behaviors.
Maybe you need to copy and paste a lengthy error message. Maybe there’s a word you don’t understand you want to look up in a dictionary. Maybe the interface isn’t in your native language and you want to translate it.
The fact that most mainstream computing environments don’t offer this in 2019 doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, rather that our systems have regressed in some (many?) areas when it comes to usability.
How would you know? You have never used such a system because it doesn't exist, how do you know it's better?
If you had ever implemented something like a drag and drop UI, a context menu, or even a a simple button using plain old HTML, you would've immediately noticed that selectable text interferes with user interaction. It's the first thing you disable and it's the reason why "user-select:none" must exist.
I have, it does, it's called Oberon, it was glorious.
Copying text from UI elements was also never an issue for me in GTK2 (can't speak for 3, haven't used it much), it was great (although I admit I don't know if there were a few places in the system where I couldn't copy text, it may not have been 100% the case).
When I'm working in terminal apps (more often than you can likely imagine) on Linux I can also expect to copy text everywhere, it's great.
I'd encourage you to use a diversity of computing systems, it'll broaden your perspective and imagination and sense of possibilities :)
I have used text interfaces, but they are inferior for most users and many types of applications.
> I'd encourage you to use a diversity of computing systems, it'll broaden your perspective and imagination and sense of possibilities :)
I suggest the same to you, but at the application level, not at the "computing system" level. There are a lot of possibilities with graphical user interfaces that aren't limited to text.
Usually it's possible by just starting the selection beside the button and dragging across. For example, you can select a navigation button on HN easily this way, along with most sites. I use this all the time when I'm reading about products and want to copy the product name or model number, but it's part of a breadcrumb navigation. It would actually be nice if there was a browser shortcut, where if I hold "s" I can disable opening links during that time and select buttons like normal text.
One would argue that there would be bloat -- having to install multiple extensions. But then visiting random websites is completely safe, and the only ones that we have to care about is the popular ones that many people have extensions for.
https://userstyles.org/styles/178336/force-allow-text-select...
There is no valid reason why cookies are needed to display HTML.
The article states that it's been turned back off, but I'm not sure when that edit was. At the very least, here's a report of it happening two months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/IgnorantImgur/comments/diunko/why_d...
javascript:(function(){function%20allowTextSelection(){document.onselectstart%20=%20null;%20document.onmousedown%20=%20null;%20document.onmouseup%20=%20null;%20window.console&&console.log('allowTextSelection');var%20style=document.createElement('style');style.type='text/css';style.innerHTML='*,p,div{user-select:text%20!important;-moz-user-select:text%20!important;-webkit-user-select:text%20!important;}';document.head.appendChild(style);var%20elArray=document.body.getElementsByTagName('*');for(var%20i=0;i<elArray.length;i++){var%20el=elArray[i];el.onselectstart=el.ondragstart=el.ondrag=el.oncontextmenu=el.onmousedown=el.onmouseup=function(){return%20true};if(el%20instanceof%20HTMLInputElement&&['text','password','email','number','tel','url'].indexOf(el.type.toLowerCase())>-1){el.removeAttribute('disabled');el.onkeydown=el.onkeyup=function(){return%20true};}}}allowTextSelection();})(); * { user-select: unset !important; }
Secondly, creator-centric platforms don't pay off. Platforms bring the audience, creators bring the content. Platforms make creators, not the other way around. No creator got from zero to hero without a platform that has attained critical mass. That mass isn't attained by catering to the creators, but to the audience. The audience doesn't care about creators until the platform introduces them.
If creator-centric platforms paid off, there wouldn't be these insane commissions (often upwards of fifty percent) that creators are willing to give up just to be on the platform. Competition would drive commissions down. Rather, it's more of a winner-takes-all game, and those winner platforms get away with it. Low-commission platforms don't bring the traffic, and vice versa.
You are thinking of this as a YouTube alternative. It’s not.
It’s a supplementary platform that is creator focused. They are not making this for discovery. LTT put out a video explaining this.
This is more of a Patreon alternative. A place to support creators - and for creators to fall back to in case YouTube shuts down monetization.
The biggest thing I'm going to expect is that it needs to have solid RSS support: If not part of a centralized site, it needs really good support for feed standards like RSS so I don't have to check it daily.
They basically are just providing a streaming platform for content creators to share their videos with paid subscribers. Kind of like old-school Rooster Teeth as-a-service.
It's good that this is being tried, but i'm not sure you can get to critical mass this way.