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Comment by mnemonet

7 hours ago

It's a great idea and challenging YouTube's monopoly is noble, but I don't see how the economics work out. The current pricing [1] charges $20/month for videos up to 20 minutes of video, which is reasonable but still far too expensive for most people to use.

It's a great first step, but I struggle to see who this would be used by. So far Bluesky seems to be the only decentralized platform that's broken into the mainstream, and it'll only be more difficult for the video market.

- [1]: https://micro.blog/about/pricing

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mnemonet

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tracker1  7 hours ago

Was curious about Cloudflare's pricing as a comparison... it looks like $1 per 1000 minutes viewed, which means a 10 minute video will cost #1 to have 100 views... That just seems prohibitively expensive to me, it's pretty much 100% of the lower end of video advertising just for delivery fees.

I know there are competing and cheaper services, but it still seems to be a big burden to get into. I've been trying to use Rumble a bit more, as well as appreciate the entry of Pepperbox, Floatplane and others. It's still a bit of a mess and none of them match the 10' experience of YouTube on Android TV, but it's getting better.

  • simonw  6 hours ago

    $1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/

    If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).

    • JimDabell  6 hours ago

      Cloudflare Stream isn’t just for live-streaming, it’s for generic video hosting too. It does transcoding, adaptive bitrate, HLS, etc. It’s terrible and you shouldn’t use it, but it does a lot more than just serve static video files like R2.

      1 reply →

    • tracker1  4 hours ago

      I may be misremembering, but I thought R2 terms disallowed video streaming content... I'm unable to find any references to this now, though I didn't do an exhaustive search.

      1 reply →

simonw  7 hours ago

Making a 20 minute long video is a sizable time investment. I imagine many people who are willing to invest that much effort into creating content would be happy to pay $20/month for hosting.

  • mnemonet  2 hours ago

    That's a fair point, especially considering everything else you get with the plan.

    However, the pricing is still a far cry from non-decentralized solutions (for example, MUX's free plan offers 100K minutes per month [1]) and so the only other selling point is joining the fediverse—which is a good thing, but hard to get people to convert on (in Bluesky's case the turmoil that is now X was required).

    - [1]: https://mux.com/pricing/video