It'll definitely need some kind of quality enforcement to make hosting work. It'd be really useful if the app would automatically transcode to the server's preferred quality when uploading, using the uploaders device. If the server has to transcode all the video the compute costs could get astronomical.

Seems this would be a great way to drive financial support.

I've reprocessed my own video down to 480, and am surprised at how much stuff is perfectly viewable at that resolution, even on larger devices.

It's too easy to save stuff at a higher than needed resolution.

This is only semi-related but do you think it's possible to use a neural network to optimize compression?

Edit: wait I just realized I'm stupid this is 4/5 of Nvidia's AI ventures.

everything and their mother in 4k60

Here before someone makes a "yo mama" joke

Oh man I can't wait for the rational, level-headed discussions that would come out of this.

But yeah I do think a project like this will be inevitable, it just remains to be seen how palatable people will find it

Nah, I'd much rather go down the micro transaction route. You get to watch some portion of the video (say, 30s), then you need to pay a few cents to continue.

We'd need a centralized payment service to keep costs down, but the rest can be decentralized. I'm thinking we'd use something like GNU Taler, so you'd load up your account, use Taler to pay creators, and then creators could cash in every to often.