Cav's Place

One of the arguments those who oppose the concept that on-line content must be free most frequently make is that it costs more and more to deliver it because of all the multimedia elements in general and the video ones in particular that more and more sites rely on. Which, not counting the fact that many sites don’t have to and likely also shouldn’t make use of so much rich content, seems to be true. But what if it doesn’t need to be, or at least what if those costs could be significantly reduced in a pretty simple way, by storing such content in a single place?
This idea came to me while watching some game trailers. It’s true that lots of sites post their video content on YouTube and then embed it from there, washing their hands of all associated costs in a way that’s completely fair for those that obtain no revenue whatsoever as a result of the visits they receive but seems very wrong for those that have as much as a single advertisement on the page where such a video is embedded, but quite a few actually host even such generic content on their own servers. This of course also applies to all other sorts of trailers, music videos, newsworthy amateur footage, documentaries and pretty much any other type of multimedia content that’s likely to end up unaltered on a relatively large number of sites.

How would this work? Quite simple. There would be this company offering multimedia hosting to all such sites that use such content in order to generate income, including simply by having as much as one advertisement on the page it’s displayed on. Or, if you really want it done properly, it shouldn’t be a company, but a non-profit entity that would simply split its operating costs among its users according to the amount of bandwidth and services each made use of. Each piece of content would be available in the highest possible quality, and if someone submits the same piece in higher quality than what’s currently available the particular piece would be replaced with the new and better one, but also in all possible qualities below that. So you’d have video content available in anything from full HD or even better to the quality produced by early camera phones, audio content in anything from perfectly clear full surround to something barely suitable to play plain speech and so on, without allowing duplicates.
This company or organization should provide a basic open-source player that all sites that use its services would be able to embed on their pages, but also allow such sites to make their own players according to their own needs, as long as the method of accessing the content stored on its servers remains the same. The basic player should be quite like what YouTube currently uses, but allow each site to set a maximum quality it’s prepared to pay for, making only the options up to that point available for that site’s users. This way, each site would also be able to add its own captions to the content it displays even if it’d only use the basic player, while those that create their own custom players could perhaps add even more features, if they’d see any need for them. In addition, there would be an unified rating system, allowing users to rate the content, on an one to ten or perhaps one to one hundred scale, regardless of the site they view it on, resulting in an overall rating that sites would be able to display. Of course, adding this piece of code would be completely optional for each site.

This shouldn’t significantly affect the existing free video sharing services because it wouldn’t be addressing regular users, which are usually the primary target of these current services, instead only dealing with “official” content. In fact, regular users wouldn’t even be able to directly access the content hosted by this organization, as it would require a paid subscription. Or, more exactly, especially if we’re to go with the non-profit idea, anyone would be able to register and then search through the available content once it’d be confirmed that the information they provided is valid, but anything viewed or listened to would be considered as having been played on that person’s site and therefore the person would need to pay at the end of the month for the bandwidth they used, unless the owner of said content would pay for all such usage as a form of advertisement. This latter scenario could most likely be seen in the case of trailers, which are advertisements, meaning that some content could be available for free directly from the organization in question, but users should still need to register in order to access it in such a manner and there could perhaps be other methods of discouraging such behavior anyway, as this wouldn’t be the point of such a system.
The point of all of this is to reduce costs while also providing users with a potentially richer experience, without taking anything away from the sites that specialize in offering such content. In fact, it would help such sites, not only by reducing costs but also by guaranteeing access to the content, as this organization would use extremely reliable connections and equipment, with a high degree of redundancy. The total amount of bandwidth used wouldn’t decrease, and it could in fact even increase if site owners would notice that they could afford higher quality content thanks to the reduced costs, but we’d move from having the same piece of content stored in thousands of data centers paid for by thousands of site owners separately to gathering everything in a single place. That way, some site owners could get much cheaper hosting for their actual sites, as they would no longer have multimedia content on their own servers, while also paying less for said multimedia content but being assured of the highest levels of reliability and security. At the same time, users would be able to enjoy such content, perhaps in even greater quantity and quality than they’re currently used to, while staying on their favorite sites, likely reducing the need to search through various places.