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Comment by namrog84 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if a torrent style equivalent for bandwidth sharing for things like YouTube content creators could work. Like you get ads unless you seed enough and then no ads when you consume.

I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.

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The problem with p2p for video is that the storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous most platform consumers are using mobile devices with limited storage and bandwidth which would have difficulty contributing to the network.

Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.

Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.

Exactly what you described exists and is called PeerTube.

https://joinpeertube.org

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

Bandwidth costs money, YouTube can probably do it cheaper than end users at scale. But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.

> But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.

Arent these goals one and the same?

Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.

No, the cost of bandwidth is less than their subscription value, presumably providing this option would result in less profit despite lower server costs, but they already have a global CDN so I assume it’s cost is relatively low anyway. I imagine if this was a path they wanted to go down, they could crowdsource it via chrome directly, without providing any positive value for users.

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