This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
We’ve had bittorrent for many years.
The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.
One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.
That requires a payment system, though, that one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.
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But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around. And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible? Who would have to deal with DMCA notices? Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
Honestly, I’m not against a YT alternative, but I don’t want it to die after three weeks because the person behind is was too optimistic to consider to potential problems.
Yes, I agree.
It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.
An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.
That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.
With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.
The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.
With Taler I wait for it to work the kinks out. And, of course, for it to be available somewhere reasonable.
I’m in Russia, I’ll probably see Taler here only after Putin.
But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around.
True but probably doable since it would be way smaller.
And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
That’s a good observation.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible?
The uploader. But I get that could be difficult.
Who would have to deal with DMCA notices?
Only the ones where the DMCA is valid. Which means US.
Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
Do you realize that in many place such a request could be simply ignored until the dictator X does not get and order by a judge ?
Not to say that these are not real problems, but a distributed system is much more resilient to them, with the good and bad implications associated.And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
That’s a point that is more problematic since such system could|should not use something like paypal or similar services.
All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
It’s a big system, with enough moving parts that I understand the ad/pay model existing. I just wish they weren’t such prices about how they choose to operate it sometimes.
You’re right, cost of content creation comes on top of the running costs, too.
All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
If they want to make money in such system, they can simply host their node and use something like patreon to get paid.
(yes, there should be the option for a node to not be able to share a video and to stream it only to subscribed users, but that does not seems to be a big problem)