I am in video. And, to do it right, is a tall order.
I’ve been working on something in my spare time. It will make use of blossom and nostr for the distribution of content and discover ability, but that’s really where nostr’s reach ends.
Video needs to be adaptive to best ensure it can be watched. A lot of people will throw mp4s up and call it a day, but the content really needs to be segmented with sane, adaptive variants.
To aid/incentivize creators, as well as for security reasons, a kind of drm where they can maintain some ownership and/or proof of origin needs to exist. I’ve implemented (from scratch) all of the big DRM protocols, and they are all so close be Ming a great *open* platform - they just need to make use of a creator-owned key pair for identification purposes. What gets harder is trying to tie that with someone who pays for content, and having the option of that content being encrypted specifically for that viewer - this is resource intensive.
Finally, an open license server is needed to manage the collection of streams in a place the creator can control. I am working on this, too. I believe a creator should have the option to take down their content or move it to a different identity if they want. They can’t influence others ability to duplicate it (unless encrypted) nor block those who’ve paid for it from keeping their own local copy.
That’s just for serving the content.
You need a player, which is non-trivial. I think HLS (vs DASH) is more universal (and a shit ton simpler), and is supported by every mobile platform, TVs, and most major browsers (given a JS implementation). So I think a universal format can be achieved.
Then there’s the encoding. To have mass compatibility, you really need to narrow the options to a known “ladder” of quality variants everyone can then follow. If you’re new to video, this is non-trivial. But, existing streaming providers have already settled on a good subset (which we could reduce further - need to optimize for storage!).
It’s a thing. It’s being worked on, silently and anonymously. Security and proof of origin are, I believe, paramount to help reduce distrust.
For me, I’m looking way beyond TikTok clones. I want disrupt the fucking *media* the way websites did to newspapers. And it needs to be open and permissionless. And it needs to be *10x better* than the incumbents (YouTube, media corps). I think it’s not only possible, but likely to organically converge to a medium like nostr. It’s a race to the bottom, cost-wise, right now. We can out-perform all of these companies. But careful thought and planning is needed.
