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There are a number of prominent YouTubers who advertise their own alternative platforms fairly regularly, if "indirectly". There are also videos about LTT's own video service Floatplane on YouTube [0]

I'm guessing that either there's some clause in the YouTube partner/adsense program saying you can't just redirect your viewers elsewhere or you can't upload videos with the sole purpose of saying "go here for more videos".

That said, I'd be interested to see the details of what GP was talking about, because I believe it exists, I just wonder what the exacts are.

[0] https://youtu.be/oOOOfZWXPu4

⬐ belorn

I was going to say that digging through wan shows to find a reference was too hard but then duckduckgo gave me a hit of a HN post I made that referenced the twitter post.

https://twitter.com/linustech/status/1008752236027973632?lan...

And here is the wan show discussing it (thanks to a comment on HN): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKtJY6soCds&t=698s

Floatplane was never about the viewer though. You should look at their video for the release of the beta[0], I still haven't watched it though, so I could be wrong on some stuff, but that video will certainly make everything more clear for you.

Essentially, Floatplane is a fail over for Youtube. It's not there to replace it, it's there to supplement it and be there in case it disappear. That means that it will never be your source to discover someone, but it will be your source to subscribe to someone that you discovered somewhere else. It's closer to Patreon in that regard (though I believe they still have a bit of discoverability, but it's certainly not your source for that).

That means that most of their function will be geared toward creator, and allow them to offer something more to their viewer (but that for sure will require an account and a paid subscription). One of their interesting current feature for example is to allow streaming to multiple platform (Floatplane, Twitch and Youtube) in parallel.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOOOfZWXPu4

⬐ Fr0styMatt88

I think they need to let you watch stuff (some stuff) without logging on or creating an account, or at least have a landing page that's geared for viewers. I hope eventually that's what happens.

I was also extremely confused looking at it - I wasn't even sure whether I was signing up as a creator or a viewer. Then I signed up and got in and was presented with nothing except a bunch of locked content. I had watched the video on the launch and still had no idea that it was a pay-per-month thing. I'm not against that at all - I just didn't know.

I'm extremely glad Floatplane exists. YouTube is changing for the worse IMHO - at least I no longer feel like I'm their target audience.

I hope the Floatplane guys are reading this and other places and taking all this feedback in. I'm really excited to watch this one; I can see the end of YouTube, at least as a viewer and I'm glad that people are starting to build and consider alternatives.

They released a video today stating that the point of Floatplane is -not- to replace YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOOOfZWXPu4

I've followed them for a while now on youtube and it has been interesting to watch them evolve their format, content, and presentation to appease youtube's algorithms. They have been pretty open [1] about how they don't like some of the changes they have had to make to stay popular on youtube. I hope they roll back some of the more annoying changes. It appears that the ugly thumbnails sadly still persist in on floatplane [2]. It would also gladly pay for a return to 5 minute videos vs the now standard 15+ min length that gets a middle youtube ad-break and increased revenue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA [2] https://youtu.be/oOOOfZWXPu4?t=71

Here is their explanation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOOOfZWXPu4

Their site is light on details, but the TOS spells it out pretty well: https://www.floatplane.com/legal/terms

⬐ e12e

They have a video explaining their video hosting platform on a competing video hosting platform?

⬐ dharmab

They have millions of subscribers on YouTube that they want to migrate

⬐ MaxBarraclough

Do they have the ability to host videos?

I'm not seeing a live demo of their player.

⬐ ilogik

they do

⬐ jeroenhd

They do, they've been dogfeeding on their own platforms for quite a while now.

One of the main advantages that I've heard people talk about is the high bit rates, making their 1080p look smoother than YouTube 4k in some cases.

Somewhat strange that they lack a free video preview of the quality of the website, but that might just be because launching a service like this with a high quality video front and center might ruin their networking when a giant wave of new people come in.

⬐ MaxBarraclough

> that might just be because launching a service like this with a high quality video front and center might ruin their networking when a giant wave of new people come in.

If that's the case, they're not up to the task of hosting a video that goes viral.

Whatever the explanation, the absence of a demo video leaves a very bad impression.

⬐ dwild

Let them breath a little for god sake. Yeah they aren't up to the task of hosting a video that goes viral, for two simple reasons, first they are way too new to have the kind of infrastructure to support that and second, it's not even the goal of the platform.

This is not a free video hosting website, this is only allowing paid subscription. If something goes viral enough enough paid subscriber watch it, I'm pretty sure that the amount paid by theses subscribers will be more than enough to support that wave. Having more channels will certainly make theses peaks smaller too, and that will only happens once they grow bigger.

⬐ ksec

Youtube compresses to 2.4Mbps inclusive of audio for H.264 1080P, which really shouldn't be a problem if the video uploaded was clean and high bitrate in the first place.

I think another reason was Youtube did not support uploading of HEVC content until fairly recently, that has cause lot of problem especially those shoot their video with their iPhone.

And Youtube may never transcode and support the playback of HEVC content. Which means you are stuck with 1080P for Apple's users.

⬐ MaxBarraclough

> shouldn't be a problem

Anecdotally, videos streamed from Vimeo (which offers far superior bitrates to YouTube) look considerably better than YouTube.

⬐ jeroenhd

The quality of the content strongly depends on the video material. Leaves in the wind on the background of a video can quickly cause a drop in video quality. Animation, on the other hand, is usually fine with Youtube's presets. The result also seems to depend on the input format and how well Youtube's software deals with it. Many old videos made in a special Flash format suddenly turned choppy and ugly when Youtube changed something on their backend and as far as I know, that has been the case ever since.

As for HEVC, not supporting is makes sense. The cost of licensing all of Youtube's encoder and decoder systems would probably make a small dent in server cost; more than storage for H.264 content of the same length and quality would cost. For example, some versions of H.265 have a $0.02 cost per disc/title. Serving 5 billion videos (titles) each day, such a codec could easily sink the company. Of course, this is just one example of the codec licensing, and the pricing depends per region (which adds another layer of paperwork) so real pricing won't be that steep, but it's not going to be cheap to switch to HEVC playback.

Youtube has moved to VP9 and is seemingly going for AV1 as its preferred future video codec. VP9 and HEVC are pretty close when it comes to compression performance in many real world videos.

I honestly did know or even expect that Apple devices don't support VP9, but I don't blame Google for sticking to an open codec instead of giving in to Apple and their bet on HEVC for corporate contacts, especially when the codecs are this close in regards to performance.

⬐ None

None

⬐ spuz

They specifically say in that video that Floatplane is not a competitor of YouTube.

⬐ rwmj

Doesn't this compete fairly directly with Patreon? Patreon allows some hosting, interacting with the creators directly, and of course taking payments.

⬐ ortusdux

It looks to me to be an ad free hybrid of youtube and patreon. Its primary focus is video delivery, monetized via subscription. They go over some of the bandwidth numbers in the video.

⬐ nerdponx

It seems like it's meant to compete with both Patreon and Vimeo. Issues with the website CSS aside, I hope it succeeds.

⬐ belorn

Compared to pateron it would be interesting to know what the cut is between floatplane and the creator.

⬐ CivBase

As someone who uses Floatplane and Pareon (viewer, not producer), I strongly prefer Floatplane.

Patreon is fine as a donation platform, but it's mediocre for content delivery.

As a long-time viewer of LTT, I also trust them more with their content moderation policies.

⬐ ryzvonusef

How will compare to Nebula?

⬐ coddle-hark

I’m interested to see how this plays out. I subscribed to LTT on Floatplane a couple of weeks ago but the lack of iOS app combined with the kind of unfinished feel of the website made the experience not very pleasant.

I really like the idea of paying for content though.