Nostr Web Client

It's all about the CDN. Storage costs are nothing compared to CDN costs. If you have a 5 minute HD video that gets viewed 100k times end to end, at low-end public cloud CDN costs ($0.05/GB for 30 TB total) that's $1,500. And that's not including the CDN cache-fill.

Storage costs are teeny tiny in comparison.

Who's paying that $1,500? It'll be cheaper if massively scaled on private infra, but still, who's paying?

Are viewers paying the CDN costs? Are creators? If the latter and the video goes viral then what? 1 million views and then a surprise bill over $10k?

mar 6mo ago

That’s why I’m thinking of a different model: instead of free streaming like YouTube, what if viewers paid a small amount of sats (Bitcoin) to watch a video?

For example: it could cost 30 sats to watch a 5-minute HD video. When you press play, it auto-deducts the sats — 15 go to the creator, 15 to the platform. That covers the CDN cost (which is about 23 sats per full view), and still leaves room for a little profit or scaling.

The idea is to keep the costs small for viewers (just a fraction of a cent), but make the whole system sustainable without ads, surveillance, or big VC burn. Real value-for-value.

Zap stream is pretty much already doing this. The biggest problem is most of YouTube is in the fiat mindset so they won't want to pay to watch a video. Unfortunately that's the only way to make money if you don't have big pockets. YouTube isn't even profitable by the way

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Discussion

Garbage nsec 6mo ago

I think this is for sure the way, with Cahsu. And a separate wallet/mint, just pulls form the background, minute by minute, zero cognitive overhead (just have to fill up the nuts from time to time).

A lot of people do pay on YouTube, YouTube Premium has has 125 million subscribers and will hit 200 million soon. So I think enough people will pay.

If one HD view is $0.001 per minute in CDN costs then $10 gets you 10k minutes, which is 7 full days 24 hours a day. If you double that for some profit to the creator then still pretty reasonable.

The trick is to engineer all that #cashu stuff in the background, payments being made every minute under the radar. Lightning even with 3% fail rate not going to cut it.

mar 6mo ago

If you have an internal lightning wallet then lighting will work. Sites like wavlake, fountain, zap stream already have internal lightning wallets and it works fine.

People will pay but the main reason podcasters are on YouTube is for the views. YouTube still has the biggest reach.

I don't know anything about cashu but I doubt many of the Bitcoiners are going to want to deal with crypto. Most of us are Bitcoin only.

If I can't send lighting to the sites wallet then I find a different site. Bitcoin only.