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by KGIII 3193 days ago
Why should there be 100x more? Video is not optimal for lots of information. It's not interactive or easy to cite and reference. It is bandwidth intense and typically has a lower information density per byte than text has.

There are plenty of places for video, but I am not so sure we need more of it. I'd say the tendency to put more content into video format is an overall negative trend.
2 comments
chii 3193 days ago
Whether some info is in video format is irrelevant.

The fact is, the only platform for video, right now, which can work is youtube. If you host your own video instead, it both has a high cost, and low rate of returns.

If cloudflare can make hosting your own video more cost effective, it is a plus for the internet. I don't want youtube to be so dominant that they can start doing things like censoring and curating.

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KGIII 3193 days ago
My comment was about them asserting there should be 100x the video content. Why should there be? It's a pretty horrible way to share information, in all but a few situations.
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always_good 3193 days ago
CloudFlare isn't saying there should be 100x more videos.

They're saying that they can make it easy / viable / cheap enough that 100x more self-hosted video providers could exist.

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KGIII 3193 days ago
> No, to be clear, if you add up all the companies using all the CDNs you mention you only get to about 1,000 that are doing so at any meaningful and interesting scale. That's a shame. There should be 100x that. That's what we want to enable.

Emphasis mine.

That's exactly what it looks like to me, more so when I look at it in context with the rest of the comment they made?

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nkohari 3193 days ago
> No, to be clear, if you add up all the companies using all the CDNs you mention you only get to about 1,000

It's very clear that he's counting companies using the CDNs to distribute video content. What would the 1,000 figure refer to otherwise?

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KGIII 3193 days ago
And he's very clear there should be 100x more companies making video content. My contention is that video is a horrible way, usually, to convey information. More companies means more video. That's a pretty horrible idea, actually.

Video is, except for a few areas, a horrible way to impart information. The only 'good' thing about video is that you can embed unskippable ads.

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bogomipz 3193 days ago
The 1,000 was quantified as "1,000 that are doing so at any meaningful and interesting scale."

With no indication for what "meaningful and interesting scale" actually means. I even asked what the criteria was for "meaningful and interesting scale" was. I received no "meaningful or interesting" response. However I was downvoted several times.

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oblio 3193 days ago
You're assuming that video is used primarily to share information.

How Edisonian of you: http://ethw.org/Phonograph (TL;DR: Edison meant it for business but it boomed for entertainment).

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KGIII 3192 days ago
That's what communication is. Even a movie is sharing information. Even a music video is sharing information. The whole Internet is sharing information. Some of it has less value than the rest, but it is still information.
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oblio 3192 days ago
To quote again:

> It's a pretty horrible way to share information, in all but a few situations.

Those few situations are probably 80% of internet traffic :)

> That's what communication is. Even a movie is sharing information. Even a music video is sharing information. The whole Internet is sharing information. Some of it has less value than the rest, but it is still information.

Technically true, practically meaningless. If I want to see Star Wars I probably want a nice 4k video, not the ASCII 80x20 version of it.

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dx034 3193 days ago
If you have your own blog and want to provide a video, your best bet currently is to just use youtube. Many would probably prefer not using their service but providing your own streaming is just too complex.
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