
Floatplane – Linus Tech Tips launches their own video hosting platform - ortusdux
https://www.floatplane.com/
======
RL_Quine
Unfortunately their landing page doesn’t give and real confidence. It looks
like a MVP rather than something they’ve been working on for years.

~~~
choppaface
Linus is a hardware person, not really a software person.

~~~
leshow
I mean, I wouldn't really call him a 'hardware person' either. If you consider
a hardware person to be someone who does electrical or computer engineering,
like designing PCBs or microcontrollers, etc. He comes across to me like a
savvy consumer.

~~~
mendelmaleh
I don't remember him doing any of those things, I think Alex is their resident
engineer... In my eyes Linus is just a nerd and a salesman.

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ortusdux
Here is their explanation video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOOOfZWXPu4](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](https://www.floatplane.com/legal/terms)

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

~~~
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.

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hadrien01
I wonder how it it compares to Nebula (Dave Wiskus, CGP Grey, and Philipp
Dettmer). It seems to be roughly the same product, except for pricing ($5/m
for Nebula, $3/m/creator for Floatplane)

~~~
devrand
Biggest difference IMO is that Nebula is going with the Netflix-model for
their network of content creators. I'm not sure how they're going revenue
sharing, but I'm guessing it's based on proportional viewership.

Nebula is probably fine if you have a large pre-existing and engaged
subscription base. However, it's probably more difficult for smaller to mid-
sized creators. I would worry that they're not going to get enough revenue
from their share of watch time to cover their own costs. Also given that
Nebula is very heavily skewed education channels, you'd likely have trouble if
you're outside of that realm.

Floatplane on the other hand seems more targeted: you pay for a specific
content creator. This seems more similar to how places like Rooster Teeth
operated in the early days, only it's now providing the video streaming as-a-
service.

Nebula will likely provide discoverability within their catalog of creators in
return for the shared revenue model. Floatplane is way more direct but you're
left growing your subscriber base outside of the platform.

Edit: fixed some typos

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traspler
AFAIK it was started as a replacement for Vessel which shut down a while ago.
As far as I remember the initial idea was to provide a platform where creators
could release their videos in an "Early Access" Model to paying subscribers
while their back catalog would be freely available. Not sure if this is still
the plan though, seems like it has become a more all-encompassing paid video,
streaming and community platform.

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parasense
I see no way to setup my own video channel, and so this site is useless. I'd
love to find a way off YT, and this is (apparently) not the way forward. But
nice try I guess, I don't have any other remarks really, because honestly I'm
not at all interested in starting multiple subscriptions at $5 a months for
these two-bit channels. $1 per channel is a massive flex, but $5 is like some
fantasy world flex.

~~~
parasense
To be clear, at $5 per channel that is like saying the channel is half as
valuable as Netflix, which is simply not possible. That said, we get it... not
everyone has the scale to race to the bottom like Netflix, but that's the
situation just the same.

~~~
asdasdasdasdwd
I'd pay $5 for access to a number of channels, say 10, and then they
distribute their earnings depending on the time I spent on each channel.

~~~
Mirioron
This is literally what YouTube Red (membership) is.

~~~
Dylan16807
Youtube Red does not distribute each subscriber's payment over the channels
they watch. Every viewer-minute is the same, no matter if you spent 10 minutes
or 5000 minutes on youtube that month. If you watch a single channel, but only
for 50 minutes, that channel gets about five cents.

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gdxhyrd
Very good news!

Competition in this space is hard and is always welcomed, in my opinion.

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Havoc
Interesting. I like their content. Or rather about half of it, which is pretty
good by YouTube standards

So I wish them well with this new venture

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

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Dayshine
> We encourage you to contact us if you have an issue. If a dispute does arise
> out of these terms of use or related to your use of the service, and it
> cannot be resolved by way of a discussion between us, the matter of the
> dispute shall be resolved by way of binding arbitration in British Columbia
> in accordance with the Arbitration Act (BC). __The costs of such arbitration
> shall be borne by the losing party. __

Wow, that 's a hard pass then...

~~~
nerdponx
Is this any different from Youtube, Twitch, Vimeo, or Patreon? I would assume
they all have abusive binding arbitration clauses.

~~~
gruez
>Youtube

[https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms](https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)

no hits for "arbit"(ration)

~~~
jeroenhd
I suppose YouTube doesn't need arbitration, they'll just van your accounts and
ignore you until you make enough of a stink on social media.

I expected YouTube to have an arbitration class myself but as it probably
didn't have one from the start and the extra stink of adding it now would only
serve to make people more hostile to the platform, adding it probably doesn't
make sense..

Most (American) Internet companies do have an arbitration clause though so I
can see where the parent comes from. It's expected to be in the terms of any
web company these days.

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bpfrh
The terms of service are not that great, no step up from youtube. I can't
understand why current businesses think it is right to simply allow themselfes
to arbitarly raise fees and delete accounts and content without any warning.

~~~
tiborsaas
You have to protect yourself. If you get offensive content then your best
course of action is to get rid of it asap.

Think of nazi propaganda, animal abuse or other freaky shit.

And yes, the lines are blurry.

~~~
bpfrh
It would be alright for me if the terms of use where:

If your content is against the law, or does not conform to the guidelines that
where written in the terms of use, it will be removed.

And for the guidelines: A Guideline change will be communicated at least half
a year before the changes

This gives people ample time to other plattforms or move videos.

EDIT:

And of course if you are a repeate offender you get banned for X
weeks/months/years,

or you have to have a manuall review on each update which raises your fees.

~~~
tiborsaas
You are just framing the same thing in a different way. The ToS is lawyer
speak, how they enforce it is a really different question.

To provide a service for the vast majority you need powerful legal tools
against the small, but smart devious users. Strict wording is part of this
never ending battle.

At YouTube scale it's very hard and injustice is baked into the system. With a
service like Floatplane, you can police it fairly easily. To a point... :)
Then they will start to feel the heat.

~~~
bpfrh
Not really.

My idea binds them to certain terms e.g. they can only ban accounts if they
don't follow guidelines,which means they have to give a reason which can be
legally challenged.

They can only change the guidelines after a warning period, which means they
have more incentitive to be constructive with the community as they can move
away in that time.

As of now, if you join the plattform you only have very few gurantees.

As per the terms right now, they could happily send you an E-Mail at around
1AM and change pledge fees to 300%.

If that lands in the spam folder, you could not notice it until you have to
pay.

Then they could ban you and delete your account without any reason, without
any refunds.

Do I think they will do it? No

Do I think a company which presents itself as a fair new company who wants to
be fair etc. should have terms of use which enable such behaivour?

No, I think it is high time that such terms of use are banned. I'm not even
sure such terms would be legal in some countries.

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gridlockd
First of all, the name is bad. It's not self-explanatory. I don't care why
it's called that and I don't care to find out.

Secondly, creator-centric platforms don't pay off. Platforms bring the
audience, creators bring the content. Platforms _make_ creators, not the other
way around. No creator got from zero to hero without a platform that has
attained critical mass. That mass isn't attained by catering to the creators,
but to the audience. The audience doesn't care about creators until the
platform introduces them.

If creator-centric platforms paid off, there wouldn't be these insane
commissions (often upwards of fifty percent) that creators are willing to give
up just to be on the platform. Competition would drive commissions down.
Rather, it's more of a winner-takes-all game, and those winner platforms get
away with it. Low-commission platforms don't bring the traffic, and vice
versa.

~~~
aprvchndrs
> Secondly, creator-centric platforms don't pay off. Platforms bring the
> audience, creators bring the content. Platforms make creators, not the other
> way around. No creator got from zero to hero without a platform that has
> attained critical mass. That mass isn't attained by catering to the
> creators, but to the audience. The audience doesn't care about creators
> until the platform introduces them.

You are thinking of this as a YouTube alternative. It’s not.

It’s a supplementary platform that is creator focused. They are not making
this for discovery. LTT put out a video explaining this.

This is more of a Patreon alternative. A place to support creators - and for
creators to fall back to in case YouTube shuts down monetization.

------
Railsify
I hope this works but for any creators who are making money on youtube: Are
you allowed to upload the same content on multiple sites and still remain a
youtube monetizable creator? Are they recommending creators move to
floatplane?

~~~
bobbean
To answer shortly: Yes No

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buboard
a few people have started their own platforms, and there s also generic
alternatives like bitchute steem etc. I wonder who will become the open source
"wordpress of youtubers"

~~~
big_chungus
A serious video CDN is one of those things that makes sense at scale. You have
to get POPs all around the world, transcode lots of different bitrates, store
it all, etc. and that sort of thing is expensive enough to get up and running
that I don't forsee a lot of small-time people putting up their own versions
(a la wordpress).

~~~
buboard
> A serious video CDN is one of those things that makes sense at scale.

Torrents provide a lot of this funcitonality

(Also, the CDN doesn't even make sense for youtube - they are not profitable)

~~~
big_chungus
Meh, torrents provide some. They don't handle the different qualities you
might want to select for, say, a fast desktop vs a slow mobile connection.
They also make controlling distribution much harder.

~~~
Zekio
depends I've seen a pretty decent solution before using WebRTC to it amongst
clients, can't remember the name of the company who had the solution tho...

~~~
RL_Quine
If you use my bandwidth to serve your own traffic, fuck you, honestly. The
internet is hard enough without wondering if random websites are slowing down
my connection by seeding torrents with webRTC.

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leshow
Maybe someone can explain, why would I pay for something like this?

~~~
authoritarian
To support creators and avoid youtube/google

~~~
mendelmaleh
...and the creators usually provide exclusive content or early access as extra
incentives.

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dayaz36
They need to make this a youtube competitor if they want it to take off

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bil7
oh, this has an actual site now. Last time I checked, it was using the LTT
forum for all intel..

~~~
Zekio
IIRC it moved off of the LTT forums over a year ago

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benbristow
So it's like YouTube but you have to pay a subscription for every channel?
Ugh.

~~~
ropiwqefjnpoa
Right, how about a flat fee subscription service where creators get paid on
the backend per views? And then you can choose to support a channel
separately.

~~~
floatboth
[https://watchnebula.com](https://watchnebula.com)

------
reggieband
I'm very interested in this space. I had an idea about 3 years ago for what
appears to basically be Nebula (which I just found today based on another
comment in this thread). My idea was basically:

* Creators are curated and are seeded from existing Youtube channels. Curation happens on the creator level where illegal content means removal of the channel.

* No advertising so latitude for monetization of brand-unfriendly content.

* User pay a monthly subscription fee.

* Money is divided amongst creators based on watch time.

Some ideas I had that I don't see represented:

* Users have the opportunity to pay more per month and can elect to spend this money in a discretionary way, like a "tip". This isn't shared based on watch time but by direct action from the user towards creators they want to show appreciation above and beyond.

* Creators can elect some of their content as "free" content, e.g. introductory videos, videos older than 3 months, etc. in order to attract and grow an audience. This free content does not contribute to their "watch-time" that comprises their share of subscription revenue but it can attract discretionary tips.

A couple of points:

* Anyone who scoffs at the idea of the discretionary monthly "tip" idea has not watched the flood of donations to Twitch streamers. However, some kind of feedback would be required in a similar way to TTS shoutouts - I'm not sure on this. We tend to focus on the majority who say "I would never pay $Y for anything!" while ignoring the whales that would happily pay $Y __* 100 given the right incentives. If you 've worked in free-to-play games then you know the revenue potential of whales. If you remove the ceiling of what people can pay, some people will pay above your wildest expectations just because they can.

* I worked in video distribution and I was closely involved in managing costs. Most people cannot believe the costs involved in delivering video. Linus mentioned terabytes of data but that is the tip of the iceberg for popular content. Costs can ramp up to $100k/month for even modest audience sizes when storage and delivery are considered. That doesn't include server costs to run the multiple back-end and front-end services needed, nor the salaries of engineers and devops to keep it up. I was unable to find a way to make the $$ work without serious up-front investment. This isn't a space you can bootstrap on free tiers of cloud services.

Ultimately the real "whales" are businesses. I don't believe any subscriber
funded effort can ever attract the kind of spend that massive advertising
budgets can leverage. That means that platforms funded by advertising will
always have a war-chest to snipe the best content creators. Think how Mix
payed for Ninja and Shroud. Even if a content creator gets popular on one of
these subscriber-supported platforms there will always be an advertising
platform ready with cash-in-hand to steal them away.

Despite some pessimism, I am actually very bullish on this idea and I truly
hope the idea succeeds!

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matthew27
Hey Linus

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m1el
To anyone who makes sites like these, please consider removing the following
CSS rule:

[https://i.imgur.com/RWqwd0P.png](https://i.imgur.com/RWqwd0P.png)

Thank you,

\-- someone who thinks selecting text is not something you should screw with.

~~~
chongli
Why can’t we just remove user-hostile features like this from browsers? At
this point I’m starting to feel like we need to start over. Create a new web,
focused on the user, that doesn’t have any of this nonsense.

~~~
gridlockd
Not every text in a user interface is supposed to be selectable. Can you
select the text on your buttons, your tabs, your dropdowns? Of course not,
because it doesn't make sense.

If you think it shouldn't be possible to develop user interfaces that rival
the desktop inside the browser, then just say so. If you merely believe
existing web standards make this possible without "hacks" like "user-
select:none", then you are mistaken.

By the way, I'm a "read with selection" guy myself and I find this behavior on
paragraphs of text unacceptable. On the other hand, none of the text on that
website is worth reading anyway.

~~~
Soft
I don't think there are that many situations where it is actually productive
to prevent user from selecting and copying text even if it's just part of the
UI. To focus on your example, copying user interface text might be useful for
users who are not sufficiently proficient in the language that the app/website
is written in and would like to copy the text into something like Google
Translate. This is especially a problem with many mobile apps that prevent
selecting text.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
The worst bit is applications that prevent copying error messages, because
they prevent copying all UI text. And then use complicated error codes. This
makes searching for the error message/code excessively difficult!

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baybal2
Clicked on it in disbelief. This happened to be another Linus.

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ocdtrekkie
So, it seems like I can't view any of these creators' content without logging
in. Not even so much as a preview of it. That's a big fail if they're hoping
to run up against YouTube.

The biggest thing I'm going to expect is that it needs to have solid RSS
support: If not part of a centralized site, it needs really good support for
feed standards like RSS so I don't have to check it daily.

~~~
devrand
They're not trying to compete with Youtube -- like at all. It's seems like
they're going for a closed-network of pre-approved creators with a existing
sizable subscription-base. They pretty explicitly said this is a platform
you'd be growing your subscriber base on as they have zero interest in
providing discoverability.

They basically are just providing a streaming platform for content creators to
share their videos with paid subscribers. Kind of like old-school Rooster
Teeth as-a-service.

