Cloudflare TV
blog.cloudflare.com
blog.cloudflare.com
I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first manner. I know a few other people that feel the same, but I can only assume that Cloudflare have done some research on this and figured out that we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.
I know it's a lot of effort (although maybe automated transcription tools have simplified this?) but it would be awesome if text transcripts were made available of some of this content for the weirdos like me out there :)
Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), or buried under irrelevancies (what’s up guys).
There is something I’d often prefer to consume as a AV recording, and that is interviews/panel discussion. The nuances of articulation, even body language may be informative. Compare and contrast the transcript with the video at https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-... for example.
A live lecture is better than video lecture because you can ask questions.
> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair
This might depend on who you hang out with. I'm a tradesperson in the steel fabrication and construction industry, and I think a lot of people in this area have a propensity to want to fix and / or build pretty much everything themselves. From this perspective, with YouTube and online written guides, DIY repair is stronger than ever.
I recently tried to DIY repair a HP 12A toner cartridge. The Youtube videos in the DIY space are a wild mixture of shoddy camera work (bad quality cameras, bad lighting), language issues (I don't speak Russian nor Hindi) and, honestly, bad quality - there is one specific step involving a specialized tool that can be improvised by a screwdriver and a hammer, but all videos I found it simply went over this crucial step in a second without showing or explaining anything. And this is the case for many DIY videos.
A manufacturer-produced service manual or an iFixit guide however? Crystal clear photos that can be zoomed in, legible English (or at least you can copy and paste stuff to Google Translate!), links to "where to buy spare parts"...
To be fair, learning many mechanical tasks for the first time is really a combination of fundamentals and application specific details (this can apply to most fields outside your expertise). As you mentioned, you can repeat the same task again mostly from memory. You could then extrapolate that knowledge to a different vehicle by referencing the application specific details in a quality service manual.
Videos are helpful because you lack the fundamentals, and they can be great for that.
Agreed with you that I rely on videos less and less as I go. But I just kind of tinker with stuff until I figure it out.
Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"
I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.
Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.
No. I never see ads on Youtube on my own devices, and that barely requires any effort.
I prefer the desktop website because it lets me watch the videos in better quality than the mobile website. m.youtube.com seems to limit the maximum bitrate and/or resolution of the videos. Did anyone else notice that?
As far as I understand it is a creative hack that use a local VPN server or something to block ads.
OTOH, YouTube now has a fairly high bar for monetization (1000 subs, 4000 public watch hours over last year)
A format that seems to work well with non-article is {topical content} + {multiple knowledgeable hosts} + {free form talk format with some segments}.
Early-MTV, the Screen Savers, and Car Talk were all essentially this format.
Good background noise to have playing while working. And the host-host, informal interaction makes it playable for longer than a pure just-the-facts source.
Some people will write a book about a subject, but I suspect that's hit and miss as well.
Keeping an article up to date is the reason wikis were invented
So it could be some security via format obscurity.
I had to fix the motor of my vacuum, for that I preferred a youtube tutorial because I want to see someone do the things I an about to do.
If on the other hand I am trying to do something in Blender I usually prefer a text tutorial to get the exact bit of information I am looking for.
Compare it to conventional teaching. You usually don't throw pupils a book with all the knowledge the could need once they can read and call it a day,but you try to ahow them how things are done.
But code, I generally like reading because most of it is abstract and in your head anyways. So I think the best media depends on what you're doing and what type of learner you are.
I'll add that sometimes I read a dozen articles and just don't get it. Then I watch an OCW and everything just clicks. The reverse also happens. Sometimes you just need a different format and/or a different voice. More options only helps.
I think it has to do with how much tacit information is embedded in your activity. Blender or vacuum motor repair videos? Yes please, because the problem domain is such that I actually need to see all the things that happen in the background of the main activity, just to reassure myself I'm on the right track. Coding? God no, typing text into computer is a very constrained activity and you gain nothing by showing it on video vs. just making an article.
I'm sure that's the case for many people. There's also a much broader audience of people who want to do these jailbreaks than programmers who are used to reading documentation. I imagine videos are drastically more accessible for them.
Often people want a quick fix designed specifically for them, and do not want to read even a few pages of docs.
I think you'd be surprised at the wide availability of written information and guides for emulation.
Other emulators, dolphin in particular, are fantastic in this regard.
I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway.
I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.
The Cloudflare blog has excellent content, I've been a long-time fan and have shared links to it with colleagues.
All that said, I feel that Cloudflare TV is a brilliant concept. The fact that such a fresh creative idea was embraced and implemented, I can see how the company culture encourages and supports collaborative innovation.
Looking at the listing of shows, I remembered my teenage years, like how I enjoyed the variety of creative talents on early MTV. I'm excited to catch some of the Cloudflare shows live - I'll probably use the picture-in-picture feature of the browser, to have a permanent window on a corner of my screen, with the live streams.
This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this.
In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.
Your example is a great one, but aside from audio and visual problems, a11y covers things like cognitive deficits, which, for some, make watching and learning from videos difficult.
> I decided to make a fuss about this.
Good on you, more people need to be making a fuss about this.
I actually wrote Chris Croyier about a small snippet of example code on his site (CSS-Tricks) that didn't follow a11y best practices. He replied, and updated the code! Nice guy.
len('accessibility') == 13
Compare to i18n, l10n.
Fortunately I work in the privileged position of never really needing to consider questions of deployment, and I am extremely happy to keep it that way.
Text is meant to be read, and not just written. I'll agree that there are chunking benefits in acronyms and abbreviations when working in a shared context, but outside of those shared contexts, the abbreviations severely impede communication.
I don't see subtitles (back to the 80s of accessibility), but it does have playback speed so you can skim and claw back some information bandwidth.
Also, with a live stream in particular, you frequently get to see the author make mistakes and stop to figure stuff out rather than just the edited and polished perfection of a published article. I find that really helps to humanize the author, and gives me confidence that even though I'm making a lot of mistakes I'll be able to get to a finished product eventually.
The two formats definitely complement each other, they are good for different purposes.
Thank you on behalf of everybody.
However, I ended up finding a use for them. I've been watching them at the end of the day when I was too tired to do any more coding work. Instead of wasting my time on YouTube, I ended up learning a lot.
As a creator, it’s laziness - I can produce a video in far less time than a quality article. As a consumer, I’ve started watching a few more video channels to learn from others - but would much prefer and retain information from the written word.
The compromise I’m approaching: YouTube do a pretty good job of automatically creating subtitles. These are readily formatted so I can add punctuation, edit, and polish into something readable (and searchable).
That also provides a text transcript!
As someone who's used the text transcripts to "search" through Youtube video content, I'd say you're on the right track.
Here’s an example of what I’ve done - as ‘simple’ as copying the text into my CMS (Wordpress) and then polishing as I read through it with some headings and graphics to make it more readable - https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-thi...
Still a 30 minute exercise, but that’s now a ~5,000 word article on the subject plus graphics plus a video.
Perhaps a tad self-effacing but the sentiment reveals a core truth: publishing a stream-of-consciousness video/audio artifact is easier than releasing a carefully planned and/or edited version.
What we seem to be missing is the processes/norms for annotating, enhancing, indexing, editing these rough digital artifacts.
I’m not sure what the value add of Cloudflare‘s scheduled content is. Some events, like press conferences, are one time occurrences. Some events, like Zoom or YouTube Live, involve multiple contributors or audience participation.
You can see this when you watch a short video or segment and the presenter stammered or misspoke and they couldn't be arsed to just do another take to fix it. As someone who had a bad habit of not rehearsing presentations before giving them, I now can't unsee that bad habit in others.
There are many good videos lectures available on YouTube from Stanford, MIT and other universities. You also have student questions on tape, very much like sitting in the real lecture. Could you explain what exactly makes the content uninteresting, when it is in video format?
Text lets me efficiently skip through most of articles if they do not get to the point, or if they linger in ELI5.
The more I know about a field, the more I want to skip bits, because I don't need to be explained the basics over again.
Anecdotally, it seems like every student on /r/programmerhumor got through their CS degree with the help of algorithms videos on youtube. Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. I prefer the book, even though I would have had no trouble understanding the accent in which these videos are apparently made.
My partner is the same. Finds it difficult to concentrate on a textbook, but easy when it's people talking. I'm not wired this way, and I don't understand why others are wired differently from you and me, but I do accept that it works for them.
The consensus Hacker News would have you think that plain text is the pinnacle of human communication because it's searchable, copy-able, skimmable etc. But many people feel differently. Cloudflare.tv is for them.
In my experience, a video and a textbook will often present content radically differently - even when they're both by the same person and for the same audience.
You give a CS professor a blackboard to explain a binary tree and they'll explain it to the level of "and three is less than five, so we go left at this node"
Ask the same professor to write a textbook, and they'll instead start writing ∑ and ∃ and defining what an integer is.
[EDIT] for math-heavy content in particular, that is. In general I don't like video very much.
I have a Linux Academy subscription and I find that the labs are really useful (they do range in quality to be fair) and that the courses are next to useless but, and this is a big but, the text content that the courses provide gives you, with the labs, probably as much as the videos.
Idk, maybe I'm doing the videos wrong or have the wrong expectations.
We are. Just the fact that every modern OS uses GUIs should tell you something ;-)
Note, you can be in the vast majority and the second half of the sentence can be true. A media channel that only reaches 10% of your customer base can still make sense.
If I'm really trying to grok material a quiet room and a book is still the best.
So it's a case of the nature of the content fitting the form of the content.
There's really no good way for me to make a bibliography of videos. And even when you do find the bit you care about, the presentation is rarely at the speed of absorption, so you end up pausing and rewinding a lot (and sometimes, there simply is no rewind button, and jumping back 15 seconds in an hour video? forget about it.)
I recall during the dotcom boom someone discovered that there was just a little bit of unused bandwidth in TV signals and wanted to earmark it for adding hypertext to the video, so that with a smart tv you could jump to further reading on a subject. This seems like a best of both worlds situation and I was disappointed to see it go nowhere.
I wonder if there's a way to do something similar with the CC data in videos...
In an era where SEO has ruined the cozy internet, content marketing is transparent and many people just don't trust the media not to lie to them, the idea that a company like CloudFlare could task a team with essentially launching the nerd equivalent of CSPAN (if not CNN) seems to me like something a genius would come up with.
This might be advertisement/marketing on two levels; both consumers and large corporations that might want to host a TV station.
The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
This is almost certainly true. I can expand here that I didn't think of CloudFlare as a "TV" company or backbone infrastructure (in the normal media space) company in that way. I think this is the realization that they're trying to get out there.
> The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
IMO they don't have the cultural currency, but to be fair, I live half a world away from what is arguably the nexus of the culture in this case (SF), so maybe I just can't see it. CloudFlare is a boring company (which is good), I don't know them for making lots of waves in this particular way. IMO what they're betting on is that doing something this big builds that cultural currency, and then it didn't matter how much you had in the first place.
If I were to dumb down your statement -- this is indeed a wonderful flex.
> No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but this sounds like what I tried to convey -- CloudFlare is introducing itself as a media distribution channel (for media corporations) and a thought/market leader for the consumer (developers, technical management).
Also, check the other responses to my comment... there's someone lurking in there who is very very close to this whole thing. Interactions like that are why I still come to HN.
I don't understand the format personally (I'd always take articles over video). It's probably appealing to a demographic that I'm not. But in either case, the approach is many years old.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but at the end of working all day in front of screen doing mentally taxing programming/devops work, the last thing I want to do is come home and watch live TV of content that reminds me of work...nor do I want to spend my weekends doing that either.
i don't really get the point of this. it's just another live conference broadcasting platform? why would people use this instead of just broadcasting on YouTube? Maybe i'm missing something but feels like just another marketing scheme that came from someone saying "hey this coronavirus is supposed to be the fad of the day for video startups, we should do something too".
the 24/7 aspect is cool and it is this point I was excited about. I thought they would do something different, instead of building a service dedicated to a fad which is probably about to expire.
p.s.
The "online conference" angle is not a good idea. Those who say "all tech conferences will die after coronavirus" have probably never been to tech conferences. Most people go to tech conferences not to watch speeches but to network in person. And there's a big difference between networking in person and doing it online in a public place. This problem may be solved in the future, but not through a live video platform, but probably through an AR or a VR platform.
As I said, the 24/7 idea has huge potential and I think cloudflare is well positioned to do something in this arena.
I think this is one of those problems where you never know how someone is going to use tools until you get your hands on them. I used to work for an engineering firm and when we bought our first 3D printer it was a toy. Then we started to realize that it could build tools that we needed on the fly and soon we had a dozen and they were always printing something. We didn't know how to use it until we had it.
Also, thanks for participating in this thread.
I'd be willing to bet that Cloudflare TV is built on top of their Stream infrastructure.
There's Cloudflare-stream[1] and also Mux[2]
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ [2] https://mux.com/
MediaConvert will transcode videos to various formats (MP4, HLS, MPEG Dash, etc).
MediaLive does on the fly transcoding for live streams, allows you to select various destinations (if you have a stream key for YouTube, for instance).
MediaPackage is commonly a destination for MediaLive and will act as an origination for live viewing (ideally with a CloudFront distribution in front of it). It also allows for easily converting the HLS to various outputs provided a timestamp (no frame specific clipping which is annoying); MediaConvert doesn't support HLS as input yet -- although you can do it.
MediaStore is basically a low-latency S3 for storage.
MediaTailor allows for stitching in ads.
So you still have to deal with transcoding, storage, etc. Azure has their own media services and Google uses (or bought?) Anvato. I think their service offerings are all pretty similar, but I could be wrong. Actually looking at Anvato, it looks like they provide a couple additional services.
Note: I don't work for AWS, but work for a video platform and we use AWS exclusively.
I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.
Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]
PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Ge...
A mini version of that is a show that John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is going to be hosting weekly:
https://cloudflare.tv/schedule/3RbW4iJZAbfN9OetUovuQ2
"Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem that needed to be solved — and how they did it."
Any chance it will show up as a podcast or on YouTube, or available to watch at another time?
I guess traditional audience participation via call and response would at least put a fairly strict upper-bound on latency...
Cloudflare seems like the sort of company that could pull that off. Netflix is another, if they did live video.
I dont understand the negativity. Looking forward to seeing your channel and your format. Maybe it will work maybe not. Great initiative. I'm from the industry, and people I work with were excited about the news.
Responses here in this thread remind me of /r/linux culture. Strange, it's a HN I haven't seen.
I understand how this benefits Cloudflare, but I don't really see why I'd tune in. Seems like a mix of Cloudflare ads and "technical" content that is barely technical. More vague TED Talk-style philosophy.
If I had to describe who I felt was the target demographic, I'd name middle managers who work in tech but don't actually know much tech.
I mean they have someone from McAfee talking about security, and title it "Cyber: The New Frontier," it is so cringy, and they seemingly don't realize that.
I obviously don't speak for others, so maybe I am wrong and there is a lot of people who want to watch video content showcasing corporate America's biggest tech illiterate "tech" luminaries, spouting their outmoded concepts of what the future will be like from the viewpoint of ten years behind the cutting edge.
Who do you think gives purchase approval for Cloudflare services in an organisation?
Tech usually prefers async, decoupled processes. Advertising and attention-for-money, however, demand a synced experience.
If I'm looking for entertainment, sure, video, audio, whatever. But if I want to learn or be informed, why should I have to waste time? If this is just the "how should creators get comped" discussion ("attention gets ads to reward content creators", etc), fine, but in a case like parent post, better use of cloudflare means more $ for them, so they probably want consumption. So, why video?
I've said this before and gotten feedback around "diff people need diff modalities to consume info" and "video can be more effective than static text". All true, which is why having text as an option is important; just video is as bad as, if not worse than, just text.
For vids where the ppl speak slow, i up the speed to 1.25 or 1.5, which helps sometimes.
For introduction to some new tech it’s fine..
Of course I have to go actually read the docs and start coding stuff, which takes way more energy, but now the vids convinced me this worth investing my time into.
Two doctor friends and I collaborated to make a site that matches PPE donators with hospitals/nursing homes/fire departments/etc that need PPE ( https://maskaherony.com ) . Over 30,000 masks have been donated so far. It’s all volunteer-run and no money changes hands. We host it with Cloudflare Workers Sites (I built it in Jekyll). I assume that much of the interview will be my friend focusing on the medical match aspects and what she’s seeing in hospitals. I’m just the lowly tech guy, she’s the one doing the hard work and saving lives. Check it out if you can!
Next: tech job interviews.
Bug raiders: bug fixing live.
Pimp my web: Xzibit manages a team of front-end engineers.
Jackass: Programming drones that do stupid things.
VH1 Behind the hits style show: Walk though git history of a famous repo
Ah yes, that's better!
Startup Cribs: Come tour the sickest offices that venture capital money can buy.
Dev Moms: Women in tech share the struggle of being a woman in tech and also being a mother.
My possibly biased perception is that people in Europe are more "internationally aware" (for lack of a better word) than those in the US. e.g. a website that is built in Europe but likely to attract international interest will include a timezone.
The schedule[0] for this just has dates and times. I have no idea when anything is, though some of it looks interesting.
Is there a "default" timezone that Americans assume on an American-centric site that doesn't actually state timezones? California?
But I agree - it should mention timezone or if it's local time. I saw "AM/PM" and also assumed it was some "stupid" American time.
In the US every TV show says something like "join us at 9/8c" - timezones are far more in your day-to-day life - certainly in the past when TV was popular.
What exactly am i supposed to be excited about?
Sounds like they need a few more GenX's on their team to help them understand the real impact MTV had. I'm struggling to see a world where CFTV has even half the cultural or generational impact that MTV had.
You may not respect or value what MTV has become, but if you grew up with MTV in the 80s and 90s, you might have a better appreciation for how high the bar actually is.
I'm skeptical that viewers will prefer this live scheduled format rather than simply posting all the videos to be viewed on-demand. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of this anachronism (and especially their 80s-era channel ID logo to go along with it) but personally I prefer to consume videos from tech conferences on-demand. [1]
It looks like they are also posting the videos for on-demand viewing in the Best-Of section, so maybe the live scheduled format is just a delightful gimmick.
[1] https://media.ccc.de is my favourite
A decade + ago, one of my closest friends was a day trader, and while inherently skeptical of CNBC, he and his cohort routinely tuned in to watch her.
As a long time user, customer and promoter, this is puzzling to me to see change in direction and lack of product focus on what brought initial interest (DNS) to Cloudflare in the tech world first with the VPN stuff and now this TV stuff.
Synchronized experience seems to enable some pretty powerful community interactions around discussion and participation that just don't seem to coalesce into a critical mass when everyone experiences (and then comments and participates) asynchronously.
I haven't been beholden to a TV schedule in... ummm... about seventeen years, I think? 2003 sounds about right for my first TiVo. (I was fresh out of college and still affected by the bubble burst, I had to wait for them to come down in price quite a bit.) The only thing I watch live are the occasional sports program and SpaceX launches. Having an actual schedule certainly shoots my personal interest to zippo in this particular product.
If I can go back and watch things, which is not at the moment clear to me, then there's at least a possibility that I would become interested enough in some particular thing to tune in live. But if live viewing is the only option, you're never going to get my attention.
Maybe in certain time zones. We’re well into Monday afternoon here, but Cloudflare TV looks like Sunday afternoon in the 80’s - i.e. nothing to watch.
Can Cloudflare put enough varied programming to make their "TV" channel similarly surprising if you tune in at random? Hard to say, but it would be neat if they managed to pull it off.
[1] https://cloudflare.tv/best-of/478d779664ac0f7ae7fe21064bdcb4...
(Probably the only issue I currently hit doing this is that my ISP forbids me to use well-known ports, and Cloudflare will neither provide free CDN on a non-standard port, nor allow me to do any sort of redirecting to another port using their free service.)
> I keep reminding our team that if we're trying to follow in the footsteps of MTV
At this point I'm commenting to be a part of one of the biggest "hey there fellow kids" events in recent tech history — lol.
Did the author just come up with this myth? Personally I’ve never heard such a statement. Not trying to undermine the issue of under-representation of women, but this could’ve been worded in a better way
* good peering all over the world
* vast resources in datacenters to host it
* minimum actual usage
* the fact that it is not one of petabytes of videos that have to be stored somewhere, but a smallish content that fits in memory
I might tune in to this "Cloudflare TV". Also when i was watching the best of video on bots there was a error saying "Quota exceeded". Not sure why that popped up.
I mostly watch TAS Block myself.
What they are showing is that cable is dying and using Cloudflare technology they can standup a global 24-hour TV station.
How many TV stations are there around the world? A lot and the future of TV is certainly digital. I don't care about the content but if they can pull this off then it's a showcase to every one of the tens of thousands of QVC, MTV, BBC, CSPAN, Discovery Channel, networks that they don't need the big cable players to broadcast anymore.
You can start your own satellite TV channel for about the price of a midsized car. IPTV is quite popular in non-Western countries and providers will basically distribute your channel for free.
What Cloudflare is trying to dop is stress test their video platform before they try and go hard to steal customers from Akamai, LimeLight, and Level3/CenturyLink.
@eastdakota any chance of a link to the musician who wrote it?
Would love to see things like twitch where they share their screen and write interesting things or play a game.
I watch Suz Hinton (@noopkat) from occasionally and her stuff is pretty entertaining (Aussie accent helps too)
They should get interesting folks like that on the show.
The MIT AI podcast by Lex Fridman is pretty brilliant. He gets high caliber folks on his podcast. That level of intellectual curiosity would deffo make the TV station a hit amongst the niche community.
It almost makes me wonder why YC never thought of this.
Funnily, I don't have this issue with music or with movies/TV. It's just lecture formats and podcasts that don't work for me.
I much prefer to read articles, guides, transcripts, etc.
Firstly, hand-writing notes without falling behind the content forces me to choose the most relevant information presented and reword that information into a concise-enough form that I can quickly write it down. This helps me actually process the content instead of just hearing it. Mentally, it feels like the information soaks into my brain, rather than bouncing off of it.
Secondly - and this is comically simple, but just as important as the first - it keeps my hands off of my keyboard/mouse, so I don't get distracted by other interesting things on the Internet (like HN) and tune out.
Video is more limiting.
but this is interesting too
It has become its own cinematography / production style just like the shaky cam style is used to make documentaries feel more authentic or action movies more chaotic.
I guess that's to be expected from the company that just launched the homophobic web filter.
What's unclear is if there is content available only here, such as actual live content.
I think it needs to say so. Things on the internet are very rarely in the correct timezone for me, so I generally just assume times given are incomprehensible hashes. I can count on one hand how many "live streams" I've watched live.
I have been looking into how I could setup a similar broadcast on demand service for some yoga studios that I help out with (zoom is terrible for online yoga classes... it distorts music... no paywall possible... video/audio quality is all around terrible compared to chaturbate... etc).
Is it really that hard to chunk video as it comes in, and re-distribute it via websocket or something to web browsers?
How does chaturbate do it? Does anybody know?