Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

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I mostly use YouTube to watch channels that I subscribe to. I already disliked when they switched to their new "feeds" view that makes following channels very tough (sometimes videos are missing, the list only goes so long, but I want to watch something far later, also no real control over what goes into your list in the first place etc.). That made me write my own feed view[0].

Vi mentioning torrents made me wonder: would combining torrents with something like flattr and a reasonably good ui plus maybe a choice of where to host comments (reddit etc.) be something that I should be working on?

Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead, there is no real extra cost that content providers would have to pay here. Probably the only question is whether people would support something like that through flattr, but it seems to me like patreon[1] is doing pretty well already. And the model to keep content at a "release early to paying members, then to the public" makes a lot of sense in general. The only real problem I can see is that YouTube does have the benefit of being very accessible - automatically converting videos for mobile devices etc..

[0] https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-sanegrid/ [1] http://www.patreon.com/

One of YouTube's huge benefits is that it's an archive. Videos published in 2008 which get 10 views a year are still available. If a video had to be popular enough for someone to still be seeding it 5 years later, a huge amount of valuable content would just drop off the web.

The author ('s server) could serve as a perpetual seed. Or someone would step up for seeding, Internet archive or similar.

Is it valuable if it gets 10 views a year?

To those 10 viewers, yes.

The other day I watched a infrequently viewed video on how to install carpet on stairs, uploaded by a professional carpet installer (and not some profit generating wikihow crap). I consider this one of YouTube's most powerful features... it's a trove of self help videos for almost everything.

Accessibility and streaming. I don't always want to download an entire video, sometimes I just want to dip into it and see if I am interested. There are streaming modes for torrents available in some clients that try to prioritize what you need to stream, but they never have worked very well in my experience.

Giving up accessibility and mobile seems like the touch of death.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I prefer to directly download long Youtube videos so I don't have to deal with the site's garbage flash and HTML5 video players, but I only do that after I've actually watched a minute or two to see if it's interesting. Some kind of a browser-based streaming option is practically required to have a Youtube-esque in-band discovery experience (a roundabout way of saying "click around and waste 30 more minutes than you meant to").

Not having to download a video/piece of music is exactly the problem that YouTube solved. Going back to this doesn't seem like the right answer to me and will likely cost you most of your audience. Furthermore, moving to torrents is hardly a solution for YouTubers who actually monetise their videos through the site.

The better solution, if you don't agree with their new comment policy, would be to migrate to another video site like Vimeo.

> Furthermore, moving to torrents is hardly a solution for YouTubers who actually monetise their videos through the site.

That's why I mentioned flattr and patreon.

I only watch at home, so clearly I'm not the right person to ask about accessibility.

Streaming though... It obviously depends on the userbase, but I have downloaded feature length videos faster through bittorrent than youtube took buffering the first minute.

Another idea - maybe a middle ground would be pre-leeching episodes. I will want to watch them eventually, so might as well download ahead of time. Best of both worlds. Actually... that's exactly the kind of thing that would kill a centralized service like youtube, but would make a torrent-based service fly.

FWIW, when I distributed a feature film online a few years ago, I was very surprised to discover that our download numbers were 4x our streaming numbers, even given very short streams.

There are a number of reasons why that might have been in that particular case, but still, an interesting data point.

Since torrents eliminate the hosting overhead

Not absolutely true. (Though a lot can be done with incentivizing the user base to make it mostly true.)

There are a good number of channels who have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, combined with the hunger for new content... I think you don't even need to do much incentivizing.

Depends on your goals. Duplicating YouTube? How do you make old, obscure stuff available? bakabt does it by incentivizing users to "adopt" old content in exchange for karma.

I would say duplication of youtube is neither a feasible nor a desirable goal.

So, basically, you're thinking that the Internet as a whole can preserve old, obscure stuff. 90% of the demand is about what's new, and that's exactly what torrents are good at distributing.

There's an initial bootstrapping period before you get to those hundreds of thousands of subscribers, though.

True, but you would have that kind of "trying to establish a viewership" either way - it just also extends it into the technical realm. Obviously the "getting people to watch my stuff" problem is a hard one to solve.

Torrents are awful if not many people like the same things you like. Hooray, I'm downloading at the speed of someone's tiny upload limit! Similarly, downloading a file and having to find/reopen it is extra overhead that's annoying for a several-minute distraction that's a Vi Hart video.

Potentially interesting, particularly for people doing longer-form content, which does badly on YouTube but better on download.

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