It's the same in P2P e.g. Bittorrent. The count of seeders (those who have the content and are uploading it to peers who need to download it) is almost always lower than leechers (those who are only downloading).
That's (at least partially) solved with incentives. Plenty of private torrent sites require you to keep a good ratio of download/upload to use them. As a kid I was definitely not a die-hard but still seeded to have access.
Yes, but that model only really works for piracy sites, and only ones with closed access[0], where you can maintain an internal ledger of who seeded what. On an actual streaming service where you have to pay for your TV shows or movies, the cost of video distribution will be dwarfed by the cost to license or produce that video. If you actually tried this on a premium video site you'd be charging $15/mo and then giving most people back a few pennies for their bandwidth.
Free-of-charge video might seem like a better fit, but that market was totally cornered by Google and YouTube; who basically have as much bandwidth as they could ever want. Yes, you can get around that with PeerTube, but there are so many other entirely unrelated advantages YouTube has over everyone else that this doesn't really confer much of a benefit.
[0] Interestingly, the FTP topsite scene would stick their nose up at even private BitTorrent trackers as not closed enough.
Yeah I remember those. One I used to use had a donation scheme where if you couldn't seed or didn't want to you could donate 10 Euros and 100 GiB of seed traffic would be applied to your account (just a number in a database not actual seeding) to keep that ratio up.
These people were _the_ tracker for the content in question so they were seeding a lot of content themselves hence the donations were a proxy.
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That's (at least partially) solved with incentives. Plenty of private torrent sites require you to keep a good ratio of download/upload to use them. As a kid I was definitely not a die-hard but still seeded to have access.
Yes, but that model only really works for piracy sites, and only ones with closed access[0], where you can maintain an internal ledger of who seeded what. On an actual streaming service where you have to pay for your TV shows or movies, the cost of video distribution will be dwarfed by the cost to license or produce that video. If you actually tried this on a premium video site you'd be charging $15/mo and then giving most people back a few pennies for their bandwidth.
Free-of-charge video might seem like a better fit, but that market was totally cornered by Google and YouTube; who basically have as much bandwidth as they could ever want. Yes, you can get around that with PeerTube, but there are so many other entirely unrelated advantages YouTube has over everyone else that this doesn't really confer much of a benefit.
[0] Interestingly, the FTP topsite scene would stick their nose up at even private BitTorrent trackers as not closed enough.
Yeah I remember those. One I used to use had a donation scheme where if you couldn't seed or didn't want to you could donate 10 Euros and 100 GiB of seed traffic would be applied to your account (just a number in a database not actual seeding) to keep that ratio up.
These people were _the_ tracker for the content in question so they were seeding a lot of content themselves hence the donations were a proxy.