Video is nearly impossible to host in a sustainable way. The bandwidth usage is among the most expensive things you can host. The only way you’re getting something better than YouTube is if it’s tax funded somehow.
Nebula works for now because it still has nowhere near the amount of videos being served and uploaded per minute than YouTube. Having to cache videos in servers all around the globe takes up significant cost too.
20 mbps may be child’s play, not often for download only, not upload, and then don’t forget that just a hundred viewers will generate 2 gbps of traffic. And hundred viewers are nothing.
Sure, most videos are not 4k. The bandwidth usage still goes up pretty quick.
I think PeerTube’s idea that viewers of the same video can serve each other is an interesting concept. Problem is, afaik most are not using dekstop computers anymore, and most of the time people are living off batteries and their traffic limited cellular data subscription, where this is probably a very costly operation for the user.
I get what you’re saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That’d be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I’m not in the streaming industry, but that’s at least what I’ve seen from Netflix’s presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn’t even the network cards, it’s the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you’re thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I’m not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn’t say that “it’s nothing”. Even just the hardware, where I live it’s the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It’s probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can’t really be run on donations like Lemmy, that’s true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you’re copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can’t handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.
Video is nearly impossible to host in a sustainable way. The bandwidth usage is among the most expensive things you can host. The only way you’re getting something better than YouTube is if it’s tax funded somehow.
Public libraries should host the peoples internet. As a service, not to generate tax dollars, not to break even.
Jumping from platform to platform is just delaying the enshitification.
Nebula is very sustainable.
The 20mbit bandwidth of a 4k video might have been a lot 10 years ago, but it’s child’s play now.
Nebula works for now because it still has nowhere near the amount of videos being served and uploaded per minute than YouTube. Having to cache videos in servers all around the globe takes up significant cost too.
I also pay for Nebula.
I’m fine paying for a service, but I’m not going to pretend that it is a YouTube equivalent.
20 mbps may be child’s play, not often for download only, not upload, and then don’t forget that just a hundred viewers will generate 2 gbps of traffic. And hundred viewers are nothing.
Sure, most videos are not 4k. The bandwidth usage still goes up pretty quick.
I think PeerTube’s idea that viewers of the same video can serve each other is an interesting concept. Problem is, afaik most are not using dekstop computers anymore, and most of the time people are living off batteries and their traffic limited cellular data subscription, where this is probably a very costly operation for the user.
I get what you’re saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That’d be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I’m not in the streaming industry, but that’s at least what I’ve seen from Netflix’s presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn’t even the network cards, it’s the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you’re thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I’m not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn’t say that “it’s nothing”. Even just the hardware, where I live it’s the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It’s probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can’t really be run on donations like Lemmy, that’s true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you’re copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can’t handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.
Interesting service but still bad for privacy
That’s probably true, but economic sustainability is what makes privacy sustainability possible.
Youtube is such a mess because it has to fight so hard to make ads work, which is unsustainable.
Nebula makes its money through monthly fees and thus has no incentives to track users beyond providing a better service.
Nebula being essentially a creators’ co-operative organization also helps with the sustainable governence side, too.
Well I sure hope it isn’t getting Tax funded
Why not? Nationalize it and treat it like the infrastructure it is. Take the ISPs, too, while you’re at it.
Will that end up with countries or territories ring-fencing things they fund for their own taxpayers?
God no