I prefer “list” view over grid view. Switching to grid view shows six videos before the break, but significantly less information about the video.
I prefer “list” view over grid view. Switching to grid view shows six videos before the break, but significantly less information about the video.
The thing is that video hosting is very expensive and only large companies like Google/YouTube can afford to do it at anywhere near their scale. You need multiple copies of every video all around the world to ensure they play well for users, with no buffering, and that much infra (servers, storage, high-quality bandwidth rather than just using Cogent everywhere, etc) costs a lot.
PeerTube exists (and has for a while). It’s a federated alternative to YouTube that uses torrents to share video, rather than centralizing it in one server.
The problem for creators is that they can’t make money off of PeerTube - thus there’s no incentive outside of making a Patreon.
Isn’t Youtube itself getting to that point too? The way lots of Youtubers complain about it and push their Patreons and alternative subscription streaming services (Curiosity Stream/Nebula/Floatplane/etc.), it sure seems that way.
You’re mostly right, expect video playback doesn’t need high quality bandwidth.
Video players usually keep a forward buffer of a few minutes of video, which means your connection can be extremely unstable and still provide smooth playback as long as your average bandwidth is sufficient.
You still need good bandwidth to ensure the video starts playing right away, plus enough bandwidth to be able to buffer ahead while lots of people are using the service at the same time. I’ve seen some video sites that need to buffer for a looooong time before the video starts playing.
A few minutes of video at 4K takes a noticeable amount of space, so I don’t think video sites would buffer that far ahead for 4K.