Where We Are And Where We're Going

[SFDebris]

As you no doubt know, we've been struggling for years to find a home for the videos - SF Debris has been an unwitting harbinger of doom, moving to a platform and watching it collapse or transform to some other kind of business. We're in the process of the latest such move, and have been for some time; unlike in previous cases, the amount of viable options is drying up. It's relatively easy to upload a thousand videos, even one at a time, if you just handle it in manageable ways. It's when each of those thousand videos has to make the gatekeepers happy that is where the problem lies, why this move is the slowest we've ever had (seven months and counting), and to ensure that every new one likewise satisfies the gatekeepers.

I cannot stress enough how absolutely devastating this move has been. In the past, a day might be lost to get a hundred videos uploaded. Right now, a day can sometimes be lost to get as few as six - sometimes a day will be lost and all that will have been accomplished is learning what CAN'T be done, to try to maybe not have those problems next time. The Lost World's hosting problems single-handedly wasted enough time that I could have done three Star Trek reviews. I had developed a new system that was working wonderfully for the two weeks before the news came, developed over the last few months of the year before the first hint of problems began, that would have made this the best year ever. As with everything else 2020, it has been utterly destroyed, the plans shredded, no ETA for even starting works that were scheduled to be completed before summer.

As for the move itself, it has settled into the following:
1) Everything that can go on Youtube with minimal fuss uploaded - DONE
2) Everything that can go on Daily Motion with minimal fuss uploaded - IN PROGRESS
3) Begin identify (via trial and error) what is holding back each individual video that won't upload and restore it one by one - PENDING

This is in addition to the normal operation of this show.

As you can see, we are on Stage 2. This is slow going because DM will only allow a small number of videos per day. This can theoretically be increased, but that assumes there were actually people who work there, and I think robots took over it long ago because after nearly a year I have yet to get ahold of anyone at all, nevermind anyone who can sort it out.

This makes Stage 2 doubly slow: it has to allow the upload of old videos... AND needs to allow the new videos that can only go on DM (in other words, most of them). So if I try uploading a brand new Star Trek video, and I can't, it may be a full day before it actually can go up, and sometimes even longer. So all of stage 2 is placed on hold while new videos are being prepped for upload because we're playing things so tight that we can't afford to lose a day for new videos, but it does mean that's possibly a dozen old videos that we didn't get up that we could have otherwise.

Other hosts? Tried them. Either costs me absurd amounts of money to use, costs you money to watch, is unreliable, has technical problems, or wants nothing to do with me, and self-hosting is not a viable option on this scale. I have not spent over half a year doing nothing, after all; if you suggest it, odds are I've already tried it, explored it, or been rejected by it. I don't make more work for myself because I like the sense of endless futility. If it sounds like there's an easy answer, then no offense, but you have vastly underestimated the size of the problem.

In a parallel world where the Vimeo incident didn't happen, there's likely about twenty more film reviews finished, three video game series underway, and eight new animated series at least halfway through their first season. You would be seeing works from The Prisoner to Robin Hood to Stargate Universe, and a few standalone episodes from the early days when it was still "all comers." For two weeks, that was the plan, and it ran like a well-oiled machine. I hope, eventually, to get back there again. In the meantime, just know things are moving forward. Delay is not a sign I don't care, it's that I care enough not to do a mediocre job and declare it done. Likewise, when you mention something is down and it's not back up, please understand that it's not because I didn't bother, it's because at that moment I literally can't.

So here's some of the things that will be happening:
October: The delayed Rick and Morty Season 1 is finally coming out.
No X-Files marathon this year (DM is stills somewhat cryptic with them)
Instead, final week is themed "I Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost".

November: Three of the Saturday reviews will be Star Trek II, Star Trek III, and Star Trek IV. This is because it will be more work than a normal Trek review just to get them into a form that I can post.
Dragon Age: Inquisition will begin. Emphasis on "begin."

December: Three of the Saturday reviews will be Star Trek V, Generations, and Nemesis.
The final video of the year will be on Christmas.
And just for fun, every week, I'll tell you something more about it.

[CharlesPhipps]

My deepest sympathies, friend. This sucks ass.

[Nevix]

*Thumbs up.* Thank you for the literal days of entertainment over the years.

Take care of yourself, and remember that your health, sanity, and family all come before the rest of us, and that we'll wait if you need to take a break.

[clearspira]

God damn we didn't know how good we had it back in the Blip years. Cheers for nothing Disney.

Its funny how cyclical time is. The likes of Channel Awesome was made because creators did not have a platform, the only of any significant size at the time being Youtube which had just been bought out by Google and was starting its copyright purge. And that's why it succeeded. Not just the talent, but the fact that there simply was nothing like it on Youtube because nothing was allowed to be like it on Youtube. If you wanted it, you had to make your own page.
And here we are now, in 2020, where we are having to go BACK to Youtube because it is no longer possible to keep your own page running due to video platforms of sufficient quality apparently being a dying industry. I'm almost certain that this was intentional but I have no proof of that.

Either way, keep on rocking Chuck. I can't give much on Patreon because I'm poor as hell but I try as I recognise the work and I have a great time both here on the forum and from watching your stuff. This is also one of the only sites in which I disable my Adblock for. And BTW, if your work is delayed it doesn't bother me. I started back when you were a little Youtuber posting grainy videos each Saturday and everything else is just a bonus. I think back to a lot of the other people I used to watch regularly back then such as Noah Antwiler and realise how lucky I am that you are still going tbh.

[RobbyB1982]

Take your time Chuck. We understand and appreciate all that you do. (At least anyone that has read that statement should.)

I know its not a solution for hosting or getting new viewers, but have you considering throwing a bunch of the back catalog up on a few torrents? I'm sure that's gigs upon gigs of stuff but if some of us could just go to a file to rewatch old episodes instead of eating up bandwidth, it'd solve a handful of problems in the interim at least and keep the original edits *somewhere*. Keep circulating the tapes, as it were.

Not THE solution but A solution to have in the background.

[MadmanMailman]

First and foremost, I want to be another voice of support. The amount of work you have had to do is incredible. Thank you.

The second thing is to offer a kind of wacky, probably unworkable solution, which you may have already looked into:

Peer to peer file-hosting. If it works for the digital pirates, it should be workable for perfectly legal content.

I know what some of the problems with this plan is. First, is having to force people to download and use a separate program to actually obtain your videos. That sucks.

Second, In order to have your videos distributed on a peer to peer network, people will have to keep said videos on their hard-drive, and stay connected to the internet (this includes yourself). That sucks.

Third, as with almost all content delivery services (other than Youtube), new watcher will be primarily through word of mouth. That sucks.

Forth, Phone users will have even more complications than usual. Having to transfer the video(s) to the phone after download elsewhere, or installing a peer-to-peer client directly to the phone. Either way sucks.

I am sure that there are other complications that I haven't thought about. I wouldn't even think about recommending such a radical proposal, if not for the extreme difficulties you are going through now. But even as a stopgap measure to get your content back up and out there, it might be worth considering.

The first problem is (in my opinion) the biggest. Even though many browsers support some form of peer-to-peer file-hosting, the implementation of such features is uneven at best. Links to the files are easily distributed via web-browser/RSS feed via "Magnet URIs" at the very least. Nevertheless, having to jump through (a very unfamiliar) hoop just to get to download the video you want is annoying at best and unacceptable at worst.

The fourth problem is probably the second most severe, and I wish there was a better way around it. I have no idea how much of your audience is mobile phone only, but that could potentially be a deal breaker for them and you depending on that percentage.

The second problem is either a small problem, or a large problem depending on a couple factors, the user's hard-disk space, and network data caps (particularly when considering uploads). The good news is that there will be a significant core of people who will more than happily download and keep all your videos, while simultaneously having unlimited data usage. For those with poor internet performance, the ability to download your videos might be a net positive, and I believe many Peer-to-peer clients have a download only mode. The much the same is applicable for those with data caps. So, this problem isn't quite as bad as it first seems. Still not as good as having a good video streaming services as far as convenience goes however. If your local bandwidth is a problem, you may want to look into "seedboxes." Most have (low-to-mid) double digit monthly fees however.

The third problem you already know all about, so I won't harangue much on the issue. I will just say that it is extremely unfortunate that Youtube is where the audience and content discovery is the easiest to come by.

...This post got out of hand. Sorry.

To wrap up:

Peer-to-peer video hosting is not a good solution. But you seem to be running out of workable alternatives. Peer-to-peer removes the need to edit content to a streaming host's acceptability standards, and can heavily defray self-hosting costs.

That's just my two cents though.

[King Green]

Insensitive Idiots are ruling the other sites.

When you interact with them they seem friendly, but that is either a facade or sociopathic nature activated?
Pray well that the DM has control and foresight about your actions unless we ALL suffer from another site-admin and server-captain becoming mad-kings/queen/entity.

[CharlesPhipps]

Hey Chuck,

Have you considered the possibility of posting download links to your video as hosted by your website? Basically, fans would download the videos directly and watch them on whatever program they have on their computers. That way you could bypass all of this nonsense. You could upload what ones could go to Youtube or not.

[TGLS]

Hey Chuck,

Have you considered the possibility of posting download links to your video as hosted by your website? Basically, fans would download the videos directly and watch them on whatever program they have on their computers. That way you could bypass all of this nonsense. You could upload what ones could go to Youtube or not.

Don't know if it would be workable. I checked the size of Arena (TOS) for an example, and it was 40 megs. Let's say every review is that big, and there as many reviews as there are Trek episodes. This would be about 31 GB. As a counter example, let's look at Galaxy Quest; that's 560 megs. Working off of about 50 movies and other similar sized things, that's about 28 GB. We're looking at a lot of storage to work with.

I don't know how many views all the videos get monthly. The recent trek videos get maybe 5k views shortly after release, the look at the Jurassic Park novel got in excess of 30k views. Even assuming only 5000 views of a 40 meg video, this comes to about 200 GB of bandwidth per video.

Looking at Wasabi as an example for file hosting (who give unlimited bandwidth up to the amount stored), the total size of the collection doesn't matter, because it's dwarfed by the bandwidth requirements. Assuming 24 videos a month and 200 GB of bandwidth per video (based on a 40 MB video and 5000 viewers), this is about 5 TB of bandwidth a month. Accounting for bandwidth spikes, call it 10 TB of bandwidth. At 5.99/TB, it would cost about $60 a month to host videos that way. Honestly don't know if that would really work.

[scraps]

Adding my support for putting up the videos into a peer-to-peer setup.

In the short term, putting the back catalogue on a public tracker ensures the videos won't get lost and you have addressed people's issue with the inability to watch your content. You won't have to worry about bots spuriously taking down the torrent, so upkeep would be minimal as long as others keep it seeded.

In the medium term, you could split the videos into separate torrents so that people don't have to download the entire back catalogue, maybe throw a "Download" link into each video page as a backup if the video is taken down by bots.

In the long term, you could look into peer-to-peer in-browser streaming as another way to watch, as you have already split each video into separate torrents. By doing so, you have a fallback and reduce the need to address the video getting taken down as quickly.

By leveraging your base, you can keep spreading the tapes and you won't need to pivot off of what you're doing as quickly since people have a fallback option.