Poll of the Day

I'm fed up with YouTube a.k.a. AdTube.
I want a LN-based streaming platform to displace it as soon as possible. I know there are already some efforts in that direction. But my anticipation took a bit of a damper when I tried zap.stream (which said 'isn't available') and lightning.video (which doesn't have good content). But I'm still hopeful that we'll see a replacement for AdTube very soon.
What do you guys think?

When will LN-based video streaming platforms replace Youtube?

Within the Next Six Months3.6%
In Six Months to One Year 0.0%
In One to Two Years 17.9%
In Two to Five Years 14.3%
In Five to Ten Years 46.4%
It'll Never Happen17.9%
There's no need to replace YouTube0.0%
28 votes \ poll ended
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I've already largely replaced YouTube with Odysee and occasionally Rumble. I keep meaning to look into adding content to zap.stream or flare, because they are severely lacking in content.
I believe this is coming though and it will be faster than people anticipate, although I still have that 5-10 years from now.
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Thanks. 5 to 10 years is too much for what I actually looking for. If you remember, I had some plans of travelling the world on a Bitcoin bike. I'll surely do that and wanna spread Bitcoin knowledge by doing so. While travelling, I'll make videos that I wanna post for I'll also require a lot of funding. So, actually I'm looking for an alternative to youtube that can possibly generate me some income so as to keep me travelling.
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You can certainly post to either of those as is and earn some sats. If your many SN followers know you're doing it, I'm sure we'll watch and zap.
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Haha! Many? I doubt I've 10 in total.
Because, I'm gonna travel absolutely on Bitcoin and my plan is that I'll reveal my identity and then be everywhere for initial funding to later expenses.
You know the bike and other things are gonna cost at least 0.2 BTC.
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92 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 10 Oct
Why don't you use your current bike initially? I'm sure you might have given it a 💭?
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45 sats \ 14 replies \ @ek 10 Oct
You know the bike and other things are gonna cost at least 0.2 BTC.
Then you better start saving money for it 👀
I don’t think you should rely on zaps for funding your journey. I’m sure even @JoeNakamoto is paying for a lot out of his own pocket. Even with his reach he might not be profitable and need other income sources.
But maybe @JoeNakamoto can enlighten us and share some advice?
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I have 4 semi permanent sponsors and still need more.
Zaps pays about $20 to $200 a month. Ie - nothing.
If btc is above 75k EOY I might make money.
If not i need to revisit everything. Currently im funding with my small stack saved over the last epoch.
Sorry for the reality check but journalism / making content and making money is a labour of love.
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You do great work Joe. Keep at it you will have a breakthrough. Keep posting your videos on SN and I will keep zapping them and encouraging other stackers to do so too.
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I too. I have been watching his videos and following for a while now. My nothing analysis say that his hard work isn't paying him off. He only have a few thousand subs on YT and only his latest video could reach 25k+ views. He really needs some more subs and market himself better. His content is best but I think he just couldn't market himself in a better way. I see a lot of bogus Bitcoin Youtubers from India have subs in 100k to millions. He surely deserves much more than what he's achieved till now
Thanks for the reply. I loved your recent Video from Britain. It really got going. Superb!
I've a few doubts and questions which only you can answer.
Like I see you've a website also apart from videos, do you do everything by yourself or you've a little team. Maybe someone for editing.
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Like I see you've a website also apart from videos, do you do everything by yourself or you've a little team. Maybe someone for editing.
I hired an editor this year! He's awesome. Then I also have random freelance people I work with. My editor is my biggest expense but he's also a friend and a bitcoiner. I also hire videographers randomly but they're expensive
I've been saving for quite some time and I do have some other means/resources to fund it but still, I think it'd be better if I can get partly or fully funded for the journey. My aim is to get at least 50% on a daily basis. Say, during the travel I have a day when my total spending is 100k Sats, I'm eying to stack at least 50k sats that day.
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164 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 10 Oct
I think you should start by travelling within India. It's already so big and you haven't travelled more than a few locations.😉
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idk why bitchute also didn't integrate LN on their platform...
For all those podcasters and video creators, I would recommend to use:
  • adding a simple LN address in the video description any viewer could pay directly with just 1 click using Alby browser extension. Must be in the format: ⚡alias@domain.com
  • or using a LNbits streamer copilot, with more funny features, as I described in this guide
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Thanks Can we use them on YouTube as well.
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exactly that
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Thanks! This will then resolve one big thing for me when I'll be travelling with my Bitcoin Bike.
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I'll be travelling with my Bitcoin Bike.
Make your own LN video channels for that. Example: https://lightning.video/darthcoin
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I've been paying attention to all these platforms. Lightning.video doesn't actually feel the best one.
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Why? You can even stream live on LN video. You can even embed your videos with paywall anywhere you like. You do not need to bring your audience only to the same site.
It just started, yes, is a long way to improve it. But you have also an easy way to integrate it with your own Shockwallet directly.
Only by using these new platforms and report back to developers you can make them better. Things are not getting suddenly done. Takes time and usage.
Go to whatever YT channel or video that have a LN address in description. Alby extension will became blue and you could send sats with just 1 click to the creator. And YT have nothing to do with this, they do not get any cut or block it.
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51 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 10 Oct
I'll say in one or two years for YouTube is becoming as you said more of an ADTube now. People are trying to get rid of such a system where they watch ads for nothing.
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lightning.video (which doesn't have good content)
LV creator here, the discovery view was probably a mistake at this stage... Can't manifest a network effect from nothing and so almost no one uses it like that. 90% of traffic and revenue is direct referrals from other platforms, creator puts free stuff somewhere with network effect -> links their viewers to the digital product.
Lightning makes video a no-brainer digital product, influencers can quit shilling scams and t-shirts and earn real revenue, so it is inevitable, but we're basically building a car without the wheel having been invented.
The lack of enterprise-grade Lightning infrastructure and delegated authentication has prevented big studios and talent agents from committing resources to experimenting with a new platform. Because of that, we've stepped back a bit to solve those problems now with Lightning.Pub and Sanctum Auth.
We're getting close to a good place on on those things, already planning when we can swing focus back to the content side...
Nothing will "replace" YouTube for discovery, we'll just break up the monopoly into a million pieces. The future is countless customized and independently operated clones of LV, all sharing one giant Nostr network-effect.
Likely Q1 next year the video bull begins its run, probably 12-24 months before they send their goons to try and stop us.
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Thank you so much for your reply. 12-24 months is what I'm actually looking forward to.
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Thanks @coinsreporter for asking this. I've been thinking for a while to start my channel as well.
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42 sats \ 5 replies \ @ek 10 Oct
YouTube is great for creators with its integrated studio and analytics.
Competitors (nostr/LN-based or not) need to also compete with that, not only with its network effect. YouTube is more than just what you see as a consumer.
Also, there needs to be an incentive to send sats. FOSS has shown that relying on donations is not the way to go.
Or maybe it is the way to go since FOSS keeps going but you need to accept being miserable if you do it full time.
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Also, there needs to be an incentive to send sats. FOSS has shown that relying on donations is not the way to go.
I agree.
The plight with YouTube and other centralized platforms is that the consumers don't get the reward. It's divided between youtube and creators.
If our platforms can change only this things, they will get successful much earlier.
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20 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 10 Oct
Why should consumers get a monetary reward? They get content for “free” (minus privacy impact of ads).
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You tag price to content, I'll tag price to my time.
Time is always more precious.
Consumers should get reward for watching ads, these days ads adathon.
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20 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 10 Oct
Ads only exist to compensate creators since there wasn’t a better way for monetisation before.
Would you rather receive sats for watching ads or simply pay for no ads? 1
I think sats for ads should be a different product than YouTube on LN.

Footnotes

  1. this is arguably already possible with YT Premium, I believe.
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I'd rather like YouTube divide the revenue between creators, audience and itself.
The same can be applied to our platforms. Can't it be?
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i think decentralized tech is generally hard to do and also quite expensive because it's mostly a labour of love before the tech really takes off. Bitcoin is an example of how long it took to get decentralized money right, after decades of failed experiments. When it comes to video streaming the costs of running such a platform (let alone its devt) are high and unsustainable via a v4v model or donations. Having said that, i think as a start it would make sense to get platforms like Odysee, Rumble and Bitchute to adopt lightning or to build tools that make it easy for them to enabling streaming sats. In my head that's low hanging fruit that can be taken advantage of. Probably can happen within the next 18-24 months. I could be wrong but that's my 2 sats
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I wonder why can't our decentralized platforms integrate ads to generate revenue?
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Perhaps they don't want advertisers to hold sway over a platform as they will likely come with their own demands ie we don't want our ads to be put on anti-vax videos as an example, but i guess it's a matter of finding the right advertisers.
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What should the model of revenue distribution for LN video streaming platforms according to you?
The same as YouTube?
Or, distribute among Creators, audience and the platform?
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The way I see things going is that there's not really a "platform" perse...
  • There's the hosting provider, that's a commodity cloud service with shit margins.
  • There's encoding/compute, another commodity cloud service with shit margins.
  • Lightning payments ultimately disintermediate the platform, so there's no "sybil fee" strategy that will work long term
  • Network effect moats get drained by direct links and Nostr's portability
  • Advertisements make for bad platform incentives as we've seen, so those move to the creator themselves doing direct shilling and using that income to pay their hosting bill
All that leaves us to compete on is the publishing and player tools that leverage all those things in the most productive way. Basically either a SaaS-like model for the tool or creators pay a small premium over the commodity costs with integrated services. We have a mix of these built in across our product portfolio.
You wouldn't believe how much work had to go into our publishing flow and making the paywalls reliable across devices...
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Sounds interesting, what is the name of your platform? Would love to check it out and is there any fee for the viewing audience when they want to watch some of the content you have on your platform?
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Lightning.Video
There's a mix... some content is paywalled (this seems to be most popular use-case), some is tip/engagement based (I think we need more network effect via Nostr for this to take off)
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Thank you for that and will mosdef check it out! Does this mean that Nostr is an integral piece for scaling this platform? Without which, it won't scale?
You wouldn't believe how much work had to go into our publishing flow and making the paywalls reliable across devices...
I'm not technical enough but I can understand how difficult it can be to create something that's never been done before.
All of my best wishes are with you.
I believe we'll succeed in creating a truly decentralized and Monetized by LN video platform in a year or so.
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That's a tough one, but i think there are two ways of doing this that i can think of at the moment. The first is a hybrid model like Youtube has where ads for free viewing and ad free viewing for premium subscriptions (with the option of paying per video you stream). The alternative would be a purely subscription based model, with different tiers for different number of hours viewed and automatically allocate sats for creators and platform once their content is viewed. indeehub is operating on this model currently, though they aren't yet what you can call a fully LN video streaming platform atm and their focus is on cinematic content, but the general idea remains the same.
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It is something that has been brewing for some time, I think that in one or two years it could be consolidated, YouTube has been a very complete platform but it is centralized and that is the scheme that we seek to break.
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Change is inevitable, if it happens YouTube is likely to react accordingly
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It might be a suitable alternative for individuals, yet I doubt it will ever become the go-to choice for the general populace.
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111 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 10 Oct
Ever is a long time
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That's exactly right! Never say never!
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It will be at least 5-10 years from my opinion.
You gotta find a way to incentivize all the creators on this new platform, and Youtube is still the best when it comes to depth and breadth of creators.
Rumble is okay, but it still is lagging seriously behind Youtube. The problem that needs to be solved is how you can get the big creators to switch platforms???
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what do you mean by replace? youtube is not gonna disappear any time soon you are always welcome to use alternative platforms like peertube
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bitcointv.com
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Will take some time but could and should happen
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Hustle says two to five.
Hopefully a nostr app pops off.
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