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i think decentralized tech is generally hard to do and also quite expensive because it's mostly a labour of love before the tech really takes off. Bitcoin is an example of how long it took to get decentralized money right, after decades of failed experiments. When it comes to video streaming the costs of running such a platform (let alone its devt) are high and unsustainable via a v4v model or donations. Having said that, i think as a start it would make sense to get platforms like Odysee, Rumble and Bitchute to adopt lightning or to build tools that make it easy for them to enabling streaming sats. In my head that's low hanging fruit that can be taken advantage of. Probably can happen within the next 18-24 months. I could be wrong but that's my 2 sats
I wonder why can't our decentralized platforms integrate ads to generate revenue?
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Perhaps they don't want advertisers to hold sway over a platform as they will likely come with their own demands ie we don't want our ads to be put on anti-vax videos as an example, but i guess it's a matter of finding the right advertisers.
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What should the model of revenue distribution for LN video streaming platforms according to you?
The same as YouTube?
Or, distribute among Creators, audience and the platform?
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The way I see things going is that there's not really a "platform" perse...
  • There's the hosting provider, that's a commodity cloud service with shit margins.
  • There's encoding/compute, another commodity cloud service with shit margins.
  • Lightning payments ultimately disintermediate the platform, so there's no "sybil fee" strategy that will work long term
  • Network effect moats get drained by direct links and Nostr's portability
  • Advertisements make for bad platform incentives as we've seen, so those move to the creator themselves doing direct shilling and using that income to pay their hosting bill
All that leaves us to compete on is the publishing and player tools that leverage all those things in the most productive way. Basically either a SaaS-like model for the tool or creators pay a small premium over the commodity costs with integrated services. We have a mix of these built in across our product portfolio.
You wouldn't believe how much work had to go into our publishing flow and making the paywalls reliable across devices...
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Sounds interesting, what is the name of your platform? Would love to check it out and is there any fee for the viewing audience when they want to watch some of the content you have on your platform?
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Lightning.Video
There's a mix... some content is paywalled (this seems to be most popular use-case), some is tip/engagement based (I think we need more network effect via Nostr for this to take off)
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Thank you for that and will mosdef check it out! Does this mean that Nostr is an integral piece for scaling this platform? Without which, it won't scale?
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Nostr isn't a scaling solution in the technical sense, but the combined network effects of all the apps that use it create something of a gravity well that can pull new users in.
Imagine making a new email client that didn't talk to other email clients, it'd be pretty useless... but because email is a protocol a new and betterer mail client has instant utility.
You wouldn't believe how much work had to go into our publishing flow and making the paywalls reliable across devices...
I'm not technical enough but I can understand how difficult it can be to create something that's never been done before.
All of my best wishes are with you.
I believe we'll succeed in creating a truly decentralized and Monetized by LN video platform in a year or so.
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That's a tough one, but i think there are two ways of doing this that i can think of at the moment. The first is a hybrid model like Youtube has where ads for free viewing and ad free viewing for premium subscriptions (with the option of paying per video you stream). The alternative would be a purely subscription based model, with different tiers for different number of hours viewed and automatically allocate sats for creators and platform once their content is viewed. indeehub is operating on this model currently, though they aren't yet what you can call a fully LN video streaming platform atm and their focus is on cinematic content, but the general idea remains the same.
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