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?
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.
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Got it! Makes absolute sense to me. Just had a brief look around of the platform and it does have great potential especially if more creators come on board. Congratulations on all the work you have put in thus far, i can imagine it wasn't a cake walk getting this far
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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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