View.ly, By @furion And The Team: My Impressions So Far
I met @furion a few months ago at a crypto conference in Bucharest. I remember that @ned was supposed to come, but at that time there were still some "domestic challenges" with @dan (eventually solved, as we all know) so @furion came. We spent a lot of time together, learned about each other past (present and future, also) and exchanged ideas.
That's why I decided to give view.ly, his video sharing project, my undiscriminated attention.
What's View.ly About
View.ly aims at being a decentralized video sharing service. What Steemit is for Reddit, View.ly might be for YouTube. Here are a few interesting differences, though:
- view.ly won't store videos on the blockchain, there will be a separate hosting marketplace for that (in my understanding, something like IPFS, or Storj, or Siacoin)
- view.ly won't be an app on top of Steemit (like, for instance, busy.org, or chainbb.com), the only thing that will be used by view.ly will be the actual blocks generation (and the underlying consensus engine). It will store there only the merkle root hashes and video meta data, and I expect that to be done using a
custom_jsonoperation, so it won't tamper with the public content displayed by the Steem blockchain - there won't be a common rewards pool, like it is in Steemit. Instead, each user will have his own reward pool, and each vote will distribute from that reward pool to the content upvoted. Sort of like tipping on steroids.
- uploading will be free
- the view.ly token will be named VIEW
- there will be only 100 million VIEW tokens, out of which 10% will be distributed in an ICO, for 4000 ETH.
In a nutshell, these are the most important points about View.ly. It may look like just a little bit, but behind each bullet point there is a lot of work and, most importantly, a lot of experience coming from somebody who has experience both in video sharing and blockchain.
All in all, View.ly is on my short list of ICOs (a list which contains 3 items, at most) and also one of the projects I'm really closely watching.
Wishing all the best to @furion and the team!
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Disclaimer: both links in this post are affiliate links, which means I'm part of the bounty program View.ly launched. With or without this program, my opinions on the project and its leader are still the same.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
I'm following the work of Viewly team since its beginning, on Telegram, and I think their project is really good. Also, their whitepaper shows a roadmap that will take more than a year for the full release, and that means those guys are working seriously to build a real alternative to the most used video hosts.
Eh, I don't know, what about DTube then? I mean, I'd like to see a believable competitor for Youtube, this is the primary reason I joined Steemit in the first place.
Unless Steemit and View.ly won't cooperate like Reddit does/did with imgur, I'm not sure how can we achieve it. it doesn't mean I wouldn't support View.ly, I just try imagining "casual" usage for these sites in the future.
I also hope they turn to IPFS, just like DTube did, as it's mostly already proven to be suitable for the purpose.
IPFS has proven to be UNSUITABLE. It is completely unstable and even when it works, load times are often slow.
I've been tooting this horn for a little while on steem, and will continue to do so: People should look at LBRY, the better alternative.
Well, consider that IPFS is still work in progress.
Moreover, as I see, and as I said, it's more and more urgent to find some sort of "standard solution". Constantly switching the very basic elements like file storage and comm protocol will hurt exposure and expansion.
On the other hand, I can understand that some are looking for solving already existing mistakes, so I'll check out this one, too.
You know what?
You convinced me.
I'll join LBRY too.
Awesome!
Keep in mind that the https portal for LBRY is currently far superior to the desktop app. It really shows the full potential of the technology, because content there loads instantly (and is fully decentralized w/ hosting).
Here's an example - just to see how fast it is: https://spee.ch/b/ms-thenavidsonrecord.mp4
I am not on the LBRY official team, just a huge evangelist... join us in Slack if you wanna learn more :-)
OK, I admit, that loading time is much faster than IPFS. The latter made me interested mostly because it's permanent and peer-to-peer and general-purpose and stuff, anyways.
Seems its more like Patreon meets Flattr than Steem. Users pledge money (like Patreon) and then distribute it with clicks (like Flattr). The will have to convince YouTubers that this system is somehow better than Patreon which is very well know now. Once a YouTuber stats using View.ly they will have to educate their fans on the View.ly platform before they earn any money. The benefits of this vs Patreon are really not clear. What do you think?
DTube on the other hand is just another place YouTubers can Sydnicate their content and start earning from the Steem reward pool. It's like a video centric door for video producers to enter Steemit. I would be more excited by View.ly if they were innovating on the Steem reward pool.
I favor the distribution model of View.ly more. Having an individual reward pool - as opposed to a collective reward pool - is closer to my own experiments in this area. In short, people are more willing to give away, if they know the value beforehand. In Steemit, they distribute something that doesn't belong to them and can't be evaluated. For a certain audience, this work really well. But video is more engaging, rare and addictive than written word.
Just my 2 cents.
Fair point. How do you imagine it would be work vs Patreon? Here is one imagined flow. I'm on YouTube and the creator suggests that I join View.ly to support them. So I hop over to their channel on View.ly. On Patreon they would have different offers for the support level like $1 early access to the videos. Do you imagine it would be the same on View.ly and I would subscribe to the channel for a set amount? Or do you think I would encouraged to load up my account and then like all their videos?
The user flow is something very fragile, it's hard to tell now how it will be.
I think one challenge with the Flattr model where users load up and then spend through social signals is that is requires the user to be in a generally altruistic. Where with Patreon you can start off by simply pledge to one awesome channel and get a reward for doing so, this can lead to users who then go on to find other channels to pledge for as they become more altruistic.
I think we should wait and see.
Very interesting wp, thank's. Competition with LBRY and Dtube will be interesting.
ahaha a very short list indeed. Mine had cosmos and that was pretty it.
but how does view.ly compare to dtube ??
for me: easily, I know one of the view.ly founders in real life. That's pretty much it. I simply don't have time to look over all the projects that I see, so I try to use shortcuts as often as I can. That's one of these shortcuts. I don't say dtube is worse or better, I say that when it comes to video sharing, I'd go with view.ly.
Make your own assessment :)
I would like to see a variety of video websites, competition is good! I just got into posting video's as proof of work for my art.
been trying it recently not been able to upload. i know he's setting up infrastructure but should really have some 'don't upload' sign or something at the minute.
I am still waiting for EOS to come out and someone developing a 100% decentralized youtube service ^^ But this sounds pretty good too, tbh
@dragosroua,
Sounds good! I hate ICO, but I think I will give it a try again :D Thank you very much for sharing this information friend!
Cheers~