It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also finding that out.
There's absolutely a business, if you have license to good content that people want to see. If you don't, then you're in a horrible commodity market -- you're reselling bandwidth.
As consumer Internet grew, that became more and more unstable, until Netflix hit and just absolutely overwhelmed it.
Recently buying computing hardware I selected an American provider for my eu based lab. After paying the invoices the bean counters then asked if I could get the money back because they didn't want to pay VAT. I said feel free to ask for the money back yourself I'm happy with the purchase that you already approved. They refused and kept going up the chain until the director said just pay the VAT. after countless emails, meetings, and other time wasting activities, VAT ended up being 8 euros. Bean counters create drama to justify their bean counting.
I'm sure there are good reasons for them. But they are often simply in the way.
But you can make a comfortable living as a small VAR by just buying product and charging more to companies for it in the way their bean counters like to see it.
$1000 item with $8 VAT line item? Unacceptable.
$2000 same item with no VAT? Perfectly cromulent.
Yep - at a previous job I think there was some expensive tool that would never have been approved, but someone decided to buy it from AWS Marketplace instead where it was just a rounding error in the total monthly AWS spend.
Peering exist everywhere, and at scale you have to pay, yes.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli...
Turn the whole thing into a self-referential product placement & affiliate scheme.
(Some of us have been dreaming about it becoming reality for decades, but some of us have also given up years ago.)
They don't seem to be p2p either, they have some server. Maybe it's stolen infra.
Unless there's some kind option where youtube or twitch signs a contract with select creators and then hands them huge sums of cash upfront for the costs of future content production, or to license the creator's existing content to distribute via youtube/twitch then the cost of getting that content is still just as free for youtube/twitch as it is for the pirate streamers that upload bluray rips.
Ad revenue is money gained from advertisers at the expense of viewers, it's entirely separate from the cost of the content being viewed.
That’s exactly how it works. And the fractions (on Twitch) are between 50% to 70%.
For the record this exact thing does exist for bigger streamers. See Ludwig for example, he switched to YouTube exclusively because it was a better deal than his twitch offer.
No, it is developed because the creator expects the platform to pay them for the views. Which the platforms does. Most big channels wouldn't exist without that money.
b) you find the hosting where you can just pay for bandwidth
c) the bandwidth is actually cheap, until you hit petabytes of traffic or dozens gb/s of BW
d) you don't scale for millions, you scale for hundreds, maybe thousands
EDIT:
e) most users of such sites aren't demanding for quality nor service, therefore you can compress a lot more and if you overloaded they would come to other sites (which could be operated by the same people just serving from the other place)
Actually, the opposite is true.
If you live a country where piracy is persecuted and these services aren't available and you want to watch Silo, you don't have a choice — you have to pay for Apple TV. If you want to watch Stranger Things, you have to pay for Netflix.
But if those services are available to you, then you would have those shows on any of dozens of pirate services, and you can switch between them anytime. At which point they actually start to compete on other qualities, like streaming.
In fact, many of them have much better quality, at least in the areas where their audience lives.
It's not 'opposite', it's some people care but most are don't. You can cater for those who care, but that means costs in services and people, or you can ignore all that noise and print money from Regular Joe, who bought 15-in-1 DVD mere a decade ago.
Bandwidth might be cheaper in absolute terms, but you're not paying less per user than if you scaled higher. How do you go from there to "the business model is to not scale up"
Except you need more money thrown in the hardware to be able to utilize that bandwidth. It doesn't scale linearly. At some point it's easier to setup another node to handle another 10Gbit and while you now pay double the node cost , now you can actually scale horizontally, because it's easier to serve the same content to different people from many nodes than from one big fat one.
Also, you need clients who would watch your content and would give you ad views and hence money. If you pay $1000/m more for another 10Gbit for each node in the first place then it's another $1000/node you need to get each month.
Remember, this is not enterprise customers, with $/user costs, this is profiteering from a highly fluctuating and risky market of solving the service problem... without paying the IP holders anything. Though that's a B2B service problem too, but it wouldn't be solved till corporations' greed would exist.