Post by @ajroach42@retro.social

Over the last few days I've been thinking a lot about streaming media and my relationship with it, with the ways I make use of streaming media, and with the whole concept of VOD.

This is part of my larger #rethinkComputing trend lately (that's the first time I've used that hashtag, we'll see if it sticks) but also deeply related to my earlier Small Things Manifesto and Community Media handbook.

This is a thread, it might be a long one.

#smallThings #smallthingsManifesto
#CommunityMedia
#communityBroadcastingNetwork

#smallthingsmanifesto #rethinkcomputing #communitybroadcastingnetwork #smallthings #communitymedia

0 Boosts

0 Likes

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

So, first up, I consume a lot of streaming video and audio and a lot of that comes from youtube and (until recently) Tidal.

For posting video, I'm a big proponent of #peertube. I think it's an excellent alternative to youtube or vimeo for creators who 1) have the technical skill and financial freedom to run their own instance or join and support another instance 2) don't need to make money from their videos.

But I'll be the first to admit that this is a much smaller group of people than the people for whom Youtube feels like a good option.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

I run #NETV and #CBN both of which are on peertube and youtube at this point.

Everything (nearly everything, I don't always have 100% of the rights to piece under my control) I release is distributed CC-BY-SA.

I pay about $150/month for hosting videos.

I make about $45/month on those videos, with some of that being direct financial support and some being ad revenue from youtube or whatever.

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 3 hr. ago

For straight consumption, I mostly use jellyfin. A lot of what I watch from youtube I'm actually watching on Jellyfin. (Jellyfin is like Kodi or Plex, it's a self hosted media library with an interface you can reach from Roku and GoogleTV and Android and the web.)

I've also moved my music library into Jellyfin, which is not a great place for it and I don't like it, but it means I'm not paying to stream tracks I already paid to purchase.

My Jellyfin video library is full mostly of DVDs and BR discs that I've ripped myself, videos downloaded from youtube, and an assortment of material from the internet archive (and, you know, wherever else I might find a DRM free video I want to watch.)

Andrew (making toys)

@ajroach42@retro.social 2 hr. ago

I also host a couple of podcasts and have even, at various points in the past, done video podcasts.

The hosting bill for my most popular podcast, which consistently out-performs even our most popular video series, is about $20/year.

Partially that's because it's an audio show, and not a video show, but mostly it's because it's a static site hosting a podcast, which is downloaded asynchronously when a new episode is released. I can run the thing on the absolute cheapest server under the sun and, unless we suddenly get thousands of times more popular than we currently are, I don't have to worry about distro bandwidth (and if we do suddenly get thousands of times more popular than we are, it's pretty easy for me to do some cheap hack-y wizardry to make sure our episodes keep downloading *or* to not do that and trust that most clients will just deal with constrained bandwidth or retry.)

1+ more replies