Comment by miki123211
8 days ago
Video isn't free to host, not at scale. Look at how much providers charge for "video on your own site" services. Sure, you can bypass these providers and implement everything yourself, but that isn't going to be much cheaper. Storage, transcoding and egress just cost what they cost.
Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.
P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.
"Not at scale" is kind of the point; there's no need for one company to host everything. If I were so inclined I could host Netflix quality streaming off my home Internet connection to my entire neighborhood with a selection of thousands of movies for about the capital cost of a new iphone.
Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.
I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.
The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.