I was with Vimeo for a while – quite a while, actually – but they started being really weird about the kind of content that they would except for the platform, changing the rules subtly under my feet until I really didn't feel like there was anything I could put on the platform under my idiom, which made paying for it more than a little silly. I like the platform, but it's not a platform designed for the kind of work I want to do.

I'm not sure there is a reasonable mechanic for or monetizing public views on DTube – but I'm not sure there is a reasonable mechanic for monetizing public views. At all. YouTube's boom time ended up being relatively short because between the costs of infrastructure overhead for serving and holding that much content combined with the cost of actually paying individuals on a per view basis for advertising… It was never actually a profitable venture. It was a loss leader for advertising.

In that sense, I would almost prefer if DTube got more aggressive about stating, upfront, that while this platform is really good for watching content from people that you like, you really need to become a member of the platform/steem blockchain in order to be able to properly reward your favorite creators. ("And at no cost to you!")

If we could get that, along with a much longer window for curator rewards, I believe that DTube could be a strong driver of people joining the platform. In the short term, DTube might actually have to take a loss and suck up the cost of buying new accounts for people who sign up through it directly rather than waiting for Steemit Inc. to process new sign-ups. Given their recent large delegation from Steemit Inc., this might be something that we could see in the short term.

But that's what needs to happen. The money to do these things doesn't just appear because we want it, as nice as that would be. I like DTube's use of IPFS and I really wish that there was a way that I could inject my own video content a little more aggressively into the platform, but that would take some real interest in building some user facing tools. I wouldn't even mind if I had to do my own bit rate/resolution encoding if I could toss it all to one directory, edit some sort of templated text file in that directory with all the descriptions and such, tap a few keys and have the whole thing pushed off into the blockchain.

I don't think I'm the only one. I think it's a good gateway operation.

(Also, DTube needs to get a relationship going with @DLive so that when a stream completes, the streamers given the option of immediately archiving it onto DTube without any other engagement necessary by the user. That is a thing that absolutely needs to happen, because it's a big deal. Also it would drive traffic to both of them.)