| And Activision-Blizzard eventually removed the peer-to-peer functionality from their update downloader. I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on the mobile aspect though, most PC uses are still not done on a smartphone. And what is possible changes over the years, even smartphones are massively faster than a decade ago. I don't recommend that anyone distributes anything through YouTube (or any other platform) any more, and guess what, since a few years ago we now *actually* have a working YouTube (and more recently, Twitch) alternative ! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... And guess what, PeerTube is also P2P (based on WebTorrent) ! Just ignore these walled gardens, their enshittification is well under way anyway, and as long as you can show that alternatives are possible, you'll get enough users to flee them to greener pastures (see Xitter => Mastodon and Reddit => Lemmy as recent examples - though federated rather than p2p ones - I'm not a "decentralization maximalist"...). P.S.: I've actually used Democracy Player / DTV / Miro for a while, but it was created (slightly) after YouTube, not before... anyway alternative YouTube players like NewPipe are missing the point - there's also the whole side of having to upload your own video through YouTube's shitty interface and random whims of their ContentID. And the whole ContentID extortion business goes away once the extortionists actually have to do the hard work of sending a full blown DMCA takedown, and then possibly have to fight in court against a fair use defense, and this whole thing becomes even more unlikely to work if your server is in a country that basically ignores those (consider how VLC violates DMCA because it's distributing libdvdcss, but they are pretty much untouchable because based in France - or also how MPEG doesn't bother going after the license violators that played a DVD with VLC without acquiring the license). EDIT : heh, ninjaed about Blizzard and PeerTube... |