PeerTube! Check out TILvids for a good example.
To answer the “why not” part of that question, copying from one of my previous comments:
There’s an enormous amount of content uploaded to YouTube, as much as 30,000 hours of video uploaded per hour. That’s around 1PB per hour assuming most videos are uploaded in 1080p.
I wasn’t able to find an official source for what YouTube’s total data storage is, but this estimate puts it at 10 EB or 10,000,000,000 GB of video.
On Amazon AWS that would cost $3 Billion per month to store. The actual cost to Google is probably much lower because of economy of scale and because it is run by and optimized for them, but it is still a colossal figure. They offset the cost with ads, data collection, and premium subscription, but I would imagine running YouTube is still a net loss for Google.
If only we could crowdfund billions per month for a video site run by the community for the community!
I believe they call that taxes.
Peer to peer seems like a good idea to cope with the ridiculous amount of data used for videos. Hopefully this gets more popular over time!
It’s not peer to peer though. It’s similar to Lemmy and Mastodon where someone hosts an instance and serves video from that. Except with video it gets very expensive, so I don’t think server admins want to see a migration happen.
A peer to peer solution would actually be cheaper for everyone involved.
Does it have a payment model built into it?
Seems like infrastructure cost is a central problem of video hosting, so features to distribute that cost load among users would be must-have for any video service not bankrolled by a huge corp.
Yeah, if you had users storing the videos locally and a P2P streaming system you could reduce the cost, but I don’t think you can implement something like that through a browser.
Technically it’s possible, popcorntime worked (or works, I don’t know the current state of it) similarly. It would not work properly on mobile though, p2p is very demanding on poor little device.
Yeah, people would accept running a P2P client on their main computer, but a phone has limited resources where running a P2P server has real costs (in battery, metered bandwidth, etc).
Maybe it could work like podcasts in the olden days where your subscriptions get predownloaded when possible, but it’s way too many steps compared to YouTube.
