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You can host videos on any bandwidth and hardware you can get your hands on; old laptops from landfills, SBC Raspberry Pis, $80 decommissioned Optiplex from bus
by Espionage724 3y ago
You can host videos on any bandwidth and hardware you can get your hands on; old laptops from landfills, SBC Raspberry Pis, $80 decommissioned Optiplex from businesses, and even Android phones and TV sticks if you set the servers up through Termux. You can also use the cheapest VPS option for like $5/month, but that kind of negates not using YT at that point.
It's free in the sense of all the software being available to do so for free (OS, webserver, php, media software), and free as long as you have something to run it on; chances are anyone reading this can use the same device to run the server.
Whether or not the people watching the videos from the server will have a good experience is something different :p But even a low-speed broadband connection in the US today has enough upload to handle small sites and I can vouch for this on measly 1MB/s upload (I've self-hosted videos over years with all the mentioned software).
YouTube is a provider that has the resources to allow people to upload videos, and watch them for free. It's their platform, and they have usage rules.
- jpc0 3y ago1 Mbps would barely give you a low quality stream to a single user, never mind multiple users. My point wasn't against self hosting your own content either, but rather that this is absolutely not an alternative to YouTube in any way because scaling to YouTube's level is extremely expensive. The draw of YouTube is also the user made content, not stuff you can buy off the shelf, rip and then host. This means those users would never use a decentralized platform because discoverability is nearly impossible. The fight you are fighting is a nobel one, but reality means it's always going to be a niche solution that nerds use.