• I frankly don’t see a way for federated video to happen unless uploads are severely limited or it’s paywalled. Even with YouTube’s wild compression, you’re looking at several gigs for a single 4k video.

    Honestly the fact that YouTube exists is a miracle. Video is still just monstrously large.

    • It’s simple: don’t do 4K. It’s absolutely unneeded.

      I’ve never seen any big media content that actually benefits from more than 720p. Among other things, for watching comfortably on laptops. Heck, for most communication / reaction videos, 540p / 480p is more than enough (in those cases the audio is actually more important than the visuals).

        • Thanks. And it’s understandable, I’m guessing most of the people downvoting are the ones who are trying to defend their sunk cost after having bought into a solution without a problem.

          That said, there do are valid use cases for stuff like 1080p or 4K (or for, say, >= 120 fps). I just don’t think modern “big corp” media, or TV shows, are good examples of it. Like, honestly, what do you want to watch Avengers: Endgame in 4K for? To salivate at the warts on The Hulk’s groin?

          • You’re right on that too. Those movies actually look worse in 4k because low resolutions hide the bad CGI.

            I have a large collection of 4k blurays for my favorite movies though. Like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune look fantastic. But not every movie deserves the hard disk space.

    • I wonder when they’ll have to start deleting content to make space again. At some point, adding more and more servers probably won’t be feasible anymore.

      It really is just wild that a service like YouTube is as big as it is and just does its thing.

    • Is size really the issue though? I can torrent more than I can store on my hard drives.

      Seems like you could build a video streaming service on that. (Actually I think some people already did this.)

      • Lbry does exactly this. Actually it works way better than the last time I checked it out. I’m guessing they have invested in a centralized storage solution because I’m encountering basically no missing videos and extremely fast playback which wasn’t the case the last time I checked them out a few years ago