DTube review
I'm an avid consumer of videos on the internet. After using DTube for 9 months, here's how stacks up against YouTube and Vimeo.
Pros (versus Vimeo):
- Cypto rewards
- No censorship
Pros (versus YouTube):
- No advertising
- Privacy of data
- No demonetization headaches
Cons:
- Abymsal reliability. Pretty much a lottery as to which video will upload or buffer smoothly from start to finish, though things are improving.
- Woeful content selection
- Terrible quality. Barely 720p HD when the world has moved on to 4K/60fps.
- Older videos are often temporarily (?) unavailable - questionable long-term trustworthiness.
- No privacy (confidentiality)
- No creator tools
- Steem platform is confusing
- No censorship
Verdict: DTube is the worst streaming service I have ever used. It's so bad that every time I want to watch a DTube video, I have to go hunting for the YouTube equivalent to be able to watch it. However, it's fascinating, the first of its kind and truly innovative, and possibly the best app Steem has to offer currently. I wish DTube the best, and hope it improves exponentially in the coming months and years. I'll be revisiting it again in 2019 and see where we are at.
Question to Dtubers - Why not just embed a link to Vimeo or YouTube instead of using DTube? You'll offer your viewers a far superior streaming experience and earn 25% more. What am I missing?
I tried DTube a while back; it's not ready for primetime so that's exactly what I'm doing. I do mostly drone videos (low redundancy encoding!) which look especially terrible on DTube. Since I can't stand Youtube (Google) and their commercial culture either, I'm paying VIMEO to host there. $60.00 a year is a small price to pay to be in full control of my videos AND give my audience a pleasant viewing experience.
To keep them Steem-exclusive, my videos are set with private links and can neither be seen nor commented from within VIMEO. They can be embedded on all Steem frontends, no problems.
As an added benefit, I get to nicely format my add'l explanations or comments about the video and add photos or screenshots. Hey, it's a regular blog post! Often this saves the trouble of having to comment in the video in multiple languages, or produce multiple language versions. (recent example)
Hmm, thanks for the tip. I'm now inclined to give VIMEO a try. 60 bucks a year isn't bad.
You can try it on my blog to your heart's content. AND you can try VIMEO for free, except you're limited to 500 MB upload per week. $60.00 a year buys you 5 GB per week, which is more suitable if you do more than tiny little clips. There is even steps up from this (for more money), if you are more ambitious. Besides even more volume that would allow you to skin the player and such things. Anyway, I'm happy with it. Good luck, friend.
I agree with most of your points.
DTube works much more reliably in Europe, where our encoders, and the main ipfs gateway is located. We are working on a good long term solution for that.
Old videos don't load because we never promised to pin content that didn't get rewards (see first blog article), and because we had 3 dead drives so far (and using RAID0 before). I agree the service is unreliable but we are still in early versions (0.x) and as you noticed, we are trying to improve it, without compromising the nature of what we are doing. Well basically our change in last update with GPUs and 720p didn't go so well...
We won't do creator tools for editing and montage if that's what you are talking about. There are tons of existing open source software for that already, no need to reinvent the wheel. Also it's not like we can really edit the files like youtube does. Each video edit would be a new file upload.
Steem platform is indeed very confusing, especially for people who need to wait X weeks to get a 'free' account, after we told them it was 'decentralized'.
The 25% are going away (kind of), very soon. We will release a blog article with @dtube about it.
And about the trust, it's obviously not something I can prove to you with X+Y, but as long as I'm alive and well and that there is an active community behind the project, I will spend most of my time working for DTube, in order to achieve a fair and working proof-of-brain value distribution for (video) creators.
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated. Like I mentioned in another comment, I understand the challenges of what you're trying achieve, and wish you all the best. I'll remain skeptical till I see it working well globally, though.
If IPFS is not reliable, you should consider a hybrid system of centralized servers + IPFS (or some other P2P protocol) tokenized with SMT or so. (For now, reward beneficiaries) Decentralisation is luxury, what people want first is a reliable service with valuable content. [PS: Never mind, this would have to be a different service entirely, obviously with "DTube" you have committed to decentralization.]
I had commented in your announcement of the GPU encoding casting doubts about sustainability, and you should look into ASIC encoders instead. I hope you're investigating into that. Yes, I'm aware it's a more substantial capital expenditure, but one that repays quickly - which is why every streaming service uses ASICs. I don't have an issue with 25% - if it allows you to invest in the infrastructure required to allow a reliable service, it'll be worth it. Right now, it isn't.
Anyway, all the best!
I totally agree with every point of the review. I must concede though that I barely stream videos on resolutions higher than 480p as I am in Nigeria and have to deal with very expensive yet shitty mobile internet, as the only option. But in my journey to create content, I am looking to explore the 2160p because I realize that consuming it isn't a problem for the global audience I would want to target.
Even at 480p, it is a pain in the arse to get anything to play on Dtube; and, like you, I consume videos a lot.
I really don't see any incentive in using Dtube, because the chance of making money off the post still mostly lie on the community (and curation projects like OCD and Curie), and as much as I know, those guys don't care about what distribution platform you upload to. They just want to be able to view the content, and verify they are original.
Like you said, I would rather earn 25% more from the community, while offering my audience a smoother experience with my content. And even better technological advancement like 360° video support.
1080p would be a good start, catch up to a decade ago. Not really expecting 8K, VR/360 or HDR or 120 fps anytime soon. (All of which YouTube offers)
I would say 25% is a fair commission if it offered a reliable service.
I can spend hours upon hours surfing youtube and never get bored. I'm often amazed by the quality of the content that it suggests to me and the overall quality of the content when you hit a certain subject area (photography blogs are one of my favourites). If DTube really wants to emulate the level of popularity that youtube garners, I want to be able to go there and get lost in watching content for hours. I don't really like having videos going missing, not starting and then, when they do, having to watch some "poor man's Casey Neistat" brushing his teeth or going to the gym just so that he can grab some of that juicy DTube upvote. That isn't the sort of content that anyone should be rewarding IMHO. It seems to me that quality content continues to go unrewarded even on these new platforms which is a real shame. I'd love to be able to submit more DTube videos to curie, but even if something hints at being good from the title of the post, most of the time it just doesn't load. Now I pretty much avoid anything DTube in my curation efforts.
I'd really love DTube to be a success, but in its current form, the 'D' in DTube stands for "Disappointing"
Haha, that's funny. Credit to the poor-man's-Neistat for the opportunism though.
If I could make it to the end of any video without constant buffering, I would be disappointed about the other stuff. Instead, I'm going to call it D for dire.
It would be brilliant if a decentralized streaming service actually works. I don't expect technology anywhere close to YouTube, that's never going to happen. Just something that works, without buffering, at 1080p at least.
As a dtube creator myself let me explain. 😂
While all those are good and positive points, I would like to be able to play video on my computer. If I can't get them to play, all of the points don't mean much. I would recommend all Dtube vloggers to also add links to youtube or something as an alternative as mentioned above in one of the comments. You maybe getting some audience, but losing some as well.
It is 25% of your earnings. The beneficiary is paid in SP. Unofficially branded as "STU", the authors gets STU split into SP+SBD; the beneficiary gets all of their STU in SP. I'm guessing that's where your misconception stems from. Similarly, those who go for 100% power-up options also gets 100% of their STU in SP.
And also totally broken. Sometimes, things have never been tried before because others realize it's stupid.
I'm not asking for 16K HDR 360 degree 120 fps videos. I'm asking for the standard today - UHD 4K. Every single streaming platform offers that, and much more. What I get instead is abysmal 720p from two generations ago. Oh yeah, and even that doesn't work.
That is like Model T being slower than horse drawn carriages. Worse still, it broke down faster than horses felt tired.
It's an infinitesimal community compared to what I get on YouTube or Vimeo.
The curation is abysmal, as Mark and others point out above.
Zero relevance to the quality of service.
Absymal is a good term to represent your argumentation style.
It's not because you overuse fancy words that you are doing proper argumentation.
DTube isn't a better car, it's a plane and we are making it fly.
The community is not infinitesimal, it's small. Revise your definitions.
Our curation is way beyond what projects like @curie ever managed to do, and I guess that makes some people salty.
I won't be nice to you. I'm only nice to nice people. So yeah it is totally irrelevant for you.
I apologize, the above post wasn't directed at you, and I was just amusing myself. The words used were deliberate hyperbole, of course. It's common formula used throughout comedy.
Like I said before, I wish you the best - I hope you get the plane flying soon. Curie is hardly a good example for curation (though unique), maybe look at steemSTEM instead.
No need to be nice to me :)
Libero i was seriously trying to keep this lighthearted but ok.
The fee in question relies on the the flactuation of price of SBD. At 1$ its at 25%..
Right now, as seen from my payout on pirates of the caribbean video the fee i payed was at 10 STU, 6.6% of my author rewards. Thats a miniscule fee for helping grow the platform. And even that will go away very soon.
You ask for perfection but disregard constant improvement.
As long as dtube is showing forward momentum we should be behind it 100%
For many of us we see the youtube community, but its out of our reach. On dtube i get rewarded much more and can invest what i earn to better my content. If i did on youtube what i do on steemit and dtube i would have quit within days because i wouldnt be able to invest anything or better myself in any way.
And I was talking about the community in regards to steemit not youtube.
Looks like you have taken everything far too seriously, I had hoped you would see the humour in the hyperbole. Apologize for causing butthurt. Wish you all the best in your DTube endeavours :)
Haha. Sure Libero. Far to serious i am. You do know your name carries a lot more weight then anyones that commented here? Your choice of words exhibit a lot more seriousness and lot more negative zeal towards this topic then i am in the opposite direction. Maybe not your intention, but it does come of like that.
I do sometimes call you a grumpy grandpa😉.
Now that you powered down i think you can "take it easy" ... and ill see you around. ❤
Truth is it offers freedom, no ads no censorship and no rules, but I've got to agree with you On Some levels, I think dtube has got to be improved really, that's the only reason I use only dsound because dsound seems to be the most consistent
I'm not able to verify that there's no censorship, but I'll add it to the list. Mind you, no censorship has its pitfalls too.
Well I know it does, but don't you think too much censorship is a like a barrier or a barricade to productivity and talent? I mean
Of course, abusive censorship is a violation of human rights.
Its amazing the peroration you included after the strictures above. Is it a shame on steemit that something you mentioned as being the worst you ever used is the best app on steem? Of course.
Oh and definitely its the dtube upvote, which may or may not even come for that matter.
Cheers,
Ras.
True, and when you think about it ... the upvote makes no sense. Sure it looks nice on your page, but you’re only really getting a percentage of that number. So average upvotes that I see are around $20-$40.. some goes to curators, then 25% of your half goes to dtube. So in reality you get less than $15 on average... but you missed out on a possible Curie, or OCD vote worth more than that. Plus, all the people that couldn’t watch your video, and therefore will not follow you. People are blinded by the short term $$$. I had high hopes for Dtube, maybe one day they will figure it out, until then I will keep on scrolling.
Definitely. I thought about that too but wasnt bored enough to do the math. Shame what people miss out on.
I do hope it getd better to. Would be nice for steem, and blockchain tech in general.
LL. Its really not 25% i explain it more in my comment to Lib.
I suppose It's a backhanded compliment, but I do recognize how difficult it is to make a working decentralized video service.
You seem to be a real master of the the backhanded compliment 😆. While I am clueless about the developers side of things, I do recognize that it cannot be an easy task... but they have to make it viewable, otherwise just remove it from the platform until it is. Anyways, thanks for the honest review... honesty is hard to find on the platform these days, so it’s much appreciated.
I have mostly given up on viewing dtube videos. It does seem like a lottery. Mostly when I click one I get to see the first twenty to thirty seconds then it stutters and buffers for the rest.
I do hope it improves
Oh and the thing you might be missing... Isn't it that huge dtube upvote that they might be angling for :0D
Ah, I see, that makes sense. In which case, I would suggest include an alternative. Exploit DTube for the money by all means, but also give us a watchable video. If you just have a DTube video in your post, you'd probably not get a vote from me as I simply cannot watch it properly.
I completely agree.A double linking would be handy at the very least
@dtube sometimes upvotes the videos with its huge stake. That's all there is to it.
There is a strong anti YouTube vibe here. YouTube Demonitized me so I hate them but it's easier to upload and edit there than it is on dtube.i think I made zero cents on my dtube vid and gave up. I got the impression old videos got deleted? I could be wrong. If it's forever on the blockchain I might reconsider. YouTube Vid you make money longer than a week
Videos use IPFS, not the blockchain. I don't know about old videos, but in my testing I found plenty of old videos were unavailable.
If you hate YouTube, even more reason to embed here. Let YouTube pay for hosting and streaming your video, while you rake in the monies on Steem.