Serving longform is just expensive. A single 20 minute video viewed 100k times end to end can easily cost thousands of dollars in CDN fees. Maybe $2k if using the per-minute streamed deal thorough Cloudflare, easily $4k+ if via AWS and with higher-quality video.
So in a future Nostr where videos can get those numbers, earnings from zaps or ads would have to exceed that amount, otherwise the creator is actually taking a loss (or someone else is on their behalf).
Yup, that's (yet another reason) why I'm only betting on small niche communities.
For them the cost can be:
- more bearable
- lead to higher signal
And peer-to-peer solutions can be more viable and reliable in that scope too.
But serving the same 20 minute video over torrent is cheap (just get a seedbox and put the content there). Also people don't know how to compress things while retaining quality, a 20 minute video could be under 100MB and still be 4k, especially videos where the majority of the content is just a guy talking on camera.
Anime episodes compressed properly tend to be 100-200MB @ 1080 (sometimes < 100) and those have a much harder job than compressing a video with a giy talking in front of a camera about the news (or whatever)
There are no genralisable hacks in this world, sadly. Hence why everyone pays Cloudflare or Bunny or whomever.
No. They pay for those because the world has gotten lazy. Everyone is lazy and they want to take shortcuts.
They pay because nothing else works for users at scale. There are a number of technical reasons why you can't shoehorn Bittorrent into a CDN for a twitter clone. Latency first of all. The latency you'll get from Bittorrent, even in the best of times, will be a far far cry from what you'll get with even a lower-end CDN.
nostr:nprofile1qqsp4lsvwn3aw7zwh2f6tcl6249xa6cpj2x3yuu6azaysvncdqywxmgpr9mhxue69uhhqun9d45h2mfwwpexjmtpdshxuet59uq3zamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0q9n8wumn8ghj7enfd36x2u3wdehhxarj9emkjmn99ah8qatzx9e8gmr3vdsnsu3kv96hjcthx4hr26pnds6ngv3jv3kngumj0y6kg7nxv4jngd3exen8zefcwvm8zem4v34hxdmydf6xvuelvfex7ctyvdshxapaw3e82egy8tpxn posted this video, it's 475MB.
5 minutes of handbrake, without spending any time optimizing settings, on a non-server grade GPU, turned it into 91 MB, with only slight loss of quality (which most won't perceive). With proper optimization it could be 50MB with no loss in quality but I'm not running my GPU for 3 hours, or renting a GPU online to prove a point.
My internet at home can download that 91MB straight in under 1 second. I can also seed that much in the same time.
But this is a best case scenario; let's look at worst case.
If I have as little as 1 peer with a garbage upload, sub 1Mbps and my download is also sub 1Mbps, the video is roughly 7 minutes, so 13MB per minute, 221kb per second, I would be able to watch it, as its being downloaded, at 2x speed without any lag.
This does not pass for internet video in 2025.
