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This is how they act knowing cameras are on them, filming every thing they do, and with witnesses. Imagine what they are doing when there aren't any cameras fixed on them or people watching. What horrors are they inflicting on the people they've locked up? There are still people here in the US who support this. Those are people we'll never be able to get through. I wan't to think it will get better, but I fear it will need to get a lot worse before that happens.

Looks great 👍 Is it still on the Play Store?

This is certainly a sustainable approach, but it might end up being very unpopular with users - that and it would encourage trendy/mass appeal/influencer content vs evergreen content. It's not a wrong decision, but it definitely won't appeal to everybody. It might. Keep in mind that depending on the market, you will also have legal concerns and fees associated with hosting user-generated video content. The second anybody uploads CSAM, you're going to be dealing with international police, regulations, etc. Then add in processing of copyright claims, etc. That many users will also necessitate a user support organization of some sort. Massive economies of scale indeed - plus owning a lot of their own fiber and CDN (reducing transfer costs) as well as owning their own storage, etc. Premium is, IMO, one of the best values in streaming and it's hard to imagine that it doesn't lose google money, at least somewhat. They may look at it as losing them less money than users installing Adblock. Peer to peer, no. Federation, maybe. We'll see how things go for Bluesky and the like.

Anyone here shoot a Panasonic Pro AG-HVX200A recently or even back in the day? I'm thinking I want to go into the past for the final camcorder purchase of my life. I figure I should have a true CCD camcorder just "because" and this one might be it. Looking for any advice, thanks.

There's an interesting conversation to be had about the limitations of images to create positive change in the world, but there's also a conversation to be had about the technical limitations of our gear. What gear is really war-ready? I've long thought that camera manufacturers need to implement some kind of in-camera encryption for serious documentary work. Clearly, filming events like these is crucial. But what happens when your gear is seized in a politically sensitive context? What happens when a fascist state can use high resolution images that you capture to criminalize the people you're documenting, to find and hunt down other witnesses? The camera can be a liability too. And what could be done to upload footage automatically, or a proxy, in the event that the seized gear never comes back? Other than everyone streaming everything live all the time, which carries its own risk. We've seen now footage from people who were arrested or detained - which, I think, is fortunate but far from a certainty going forward. We're still missing a piece of the puzzle - not that ICE isn't clearly guilty of murder here - but they seized Pretti's phone, and now the fascists are the only ones to decide if that footage will be seen.

There is not that much in terms of news coverage from Iran in European and North American media even in normal times let alone when there are demonstrations and the regime is trying to subdue them (and cut off internet connections). I would guess that the government of Iran probably doesn't especially welcome journalists from the West and the European and North American populations are used to not seeing much coverage from that area, apart from the news about major war, missiles flying etc. We tend to want to see news from areas which are close to us geographically and similar to ours so we can understand and feel some closeness to it. There isn't that much news from South America or Australia, either. I would, to be honest, be happy to see fewer news from the USA and have the media focus on our own region and ignore Trump's latest deeds. But it seems that our media get much of their material from the US sources and so this is constantly coming up. What would be good, of course, is to have correspondents living in different parts of the world and living among the people there are really report what is happening from the perspective of the people living there. This includes Iran. But I suppose it's expensive to arrange and there are risks, if they don't like what you've been reporting.

Vimeo was probably one of those American tech platforms that never existed to make a profit, only to grow, backed by generous venture capital funds. It's the Amazon model. Lose money for decades and finally become so massive and big that you can finally at the end make some huge profits with a diverse business (i.e. not just books!) With Vimeo they were number 2 only to YouTube so the server costs must have been astronomical. With a return of the same concept, personally I'd do it differently. I'd make sure the subscription fee covered all the costs and made a profit which could be invested back into growing the business, rather than relying on corporate socialist handouts from banks. As for storage - you get a finite amount, and you have to delete the junk yourself to keep your account in order, or delete old stuff that never gained any views. There's a lot of waste on platforms like YouTube, a lot of junk like live streams that have 2 hours of dead air in them (just a camera pointed at a stage for example). These lower res copies pay for themselves in reducing the bandwidth bill. I think it balances out. Some users will use storage all the way up to the cap, some will stay well under it, so it's all about the average. Yes but let's say 100,000 users paying £60/yr that is 6 million quid a year, which should more than cover the hosting costs 🙂 No definitely not, it's all about the average views, everyone subsidises each-other, so when you have a breakout success it's covered. YouTube benefits from massive economies of scale but look at the cost of Premium. It's as low as $4 per month in some countries like India, with vastly more bandwidth and storage requirements than a niche filmmaking site, but YouTube still makes enough money from it to run the platform with no caps and take down ads for those users. It's a temporary increase in RAM and SSD prices, it'll all go way down when the AI bubble bursts in a few months. I don't think peer-to-peer can work for a Vimeo-clone. For exactly the reason you mentioned above :)

Look at the difference between societies with widespread smartphone camera use and functional internet, compared to somewhere like Iran where over the last few weeks 12,000 citizens, women, young men, murdered by the regime but hardly any images or footage coming out = world ignorance. I barely saw any news coverage at all. If the only purpose of the camera is to create shock and outrage, that's one thing. More useful, is it keeps a watchful eye on what the authorities get up to and when they lie it's harder for them to pass off their bullshit. Also the Leica M10 is a documentary camera that just so happens to also create stylish art, rather than the hyper clear smartphone look, so the stuff that produces is fit for the history books - which cherry pick the most iconic images. Of course number one objective must be to stay safe but if you have a chance to open your eyes and look around in these historic times, never pass it up.

Fueling hatred and chaos allows ordinary people's attention to be redirected from the fact that ever larger part of the money goes to the super-rich, and by having the working class and regular people fight with each other they cannot organize and demand fair wages and working conditions, and solutions to regular people's problems. The billionaires just want all the money to themselves and they want to bypass democracy using technological means. And now they have an autocrat who does their bidding. Yes, they are cruel people. They behave like they wanted to use up all the planet's resources before all things end (which they will not see in this current generation of billionaires, but their children or grandchildren might). However, only a part of the population believes the lies. Better education accessible to everyone is the solution. In Europe, education is a lot more egalitarian.

And, unfortunately, it is becoming too easy to blame AI for the creation of material we don't like.

I want to be wrong...but my own family...man. It's not good.

I'm more optimistic than you on this front.

I wish video documentation would stop it. But if you're here you'd kind of know it's not gonna stem the tide in my nation. Shame and reality are irrelevant now; doesn't move the needle. As an American it's pretty easy to see that the collapse of our ideals post WWII society is inevitable. The capitalists want it and they have the power, they control the narratives. And the narratives don't offer rationality--they just offer ideological excuses. Not exactly sure why the powerful want this. Maybe they're just cruel people? Maybe they know climate change is coming and will cause crisis so they need to lock things down with fascism to have societal control while covering their asses(ts)? I don't know. I do know I'm sad. I would've rather not lived through this.

Would you limit storage space for uploads and/or remove videos after a certain amount of time on the platform? Storage tends to be one of the biggest difficulties cost-wise for a video hosting site. Keep in mind that you don't store just one copy of the video at the resolution that was uploaded. You store multiple copies of the video at progressively smaller sizes - so if somebody uploads 4k, you will end up storing at least 1080p and 720p copies as well - as well as potentially 2.5k and 480p copies depending. People don't usually expect their videos to stay on the site for only 1 year. So even if you're able to stay even at £60 ($82USD)/year for a year or two, as long as people are uploading and not deleting things, your costs will keep increasing. That's also not to mention transfer and CDN costs which are also potentially high. Imagine having a single very popular creator who uploads a daily 20 minute video in 4K quality which is then streamed by 1 million people every day. Will you still charge them just $82/year even though they're costing you a lot more than that? To make it worse, storage costs are increasing a lot - thanks to the AIpocalypse for RAM which impacts SSD's as well... and since SSD's are up, hard drives also went up since the big players are buying more of them instead of SSD's. This is where decentralized options like PeerTube start to become tempting - though they suffer the problem that a chunk of the content can vanish because a single operator gets tired of paying a lot of money to host others' content.

Unusually, Petapixel and DPReview have found a backbone and posted some interesting stuff in relation to the Minneapolis protests. https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/6336791578/john-abernathy-pierre-lavie-protest-photographers-ice-minneapolis-thrown-leica Imagine for a moment if smartphones and this Leica didn't exist. All we'd have to go on is the lies coming out of the federal government and they'd easily be able to smear the dead and do the big cover-up operation they're attempting to do now. But the images all around social media tell a different narrative. And I for one commend the bravery of the folk on the streets with their cameras. The truth is constantly being debased and it really took the biscuit last week with Trump's denial of British and NATO troops service in the Gulf War, Iraq War and Afghanistan. They were on the front lines and gave their lives for it. To anyone still thinking of voting Reform in the UK, or for those who voted for Trump at any point, surely your eyes are not still CLOSED after what you are seeing in recent weeks? If yours are, I'd be fascinated to know why.

The US government twats underestimates how angry Europe is over the greenland BS and the damage we can do. The EU and UK are one of the biggest economies in the world along with China and the US. I am not sure why the US would want to piss us off. But we could ask Canada and Australia to join a customs union. We would even go all the way and have them join the EU. UK could rejoin too. We could sell the trillion dollars of US bonds and crash the US economy. But what is rarely talked about is the US services industry. They are deeply embedded in European life but this might change. VISA, Mastercard, Apple, X and many American banks could suddenly find themselves kicked out of Europe and replaced by European companies. Imagine the damage that would do to the Americans. eBay and PayPal would lose almost half of their global market share.

I would argue that social media is due a re-invention as well. Everybody hates what it has turned into (basically crap addictive television). Facebook is no longer a place where you hear from friends. It always promotes clickbait, professional content creators and ads above what your friend's post, and the stories on Instagram have stolen what Instagram started which was a linear feed of photos, and turned it into TV. As entertainment it works fine, but it undermines the original concept of what Instagram was supposed to be and why people liked it. I would have a cross between Flickr and Instagram for photographers, with decentralised hosting and no Meta copyright BS.

Interesting mentions, but it needs not to be a general dumping ground for any kind of content, it needs to be laser focused on filmmakers / artists / DPs and musicians, exactly like Vimeo was in the very early days with the full community aspect built in, comments threads, forums and really good portfolio curation. Staff Picks has to be there (under a different name of course), as a launchpad of careers like it was at Vimeo. There is no reason why it can't work again. YouTube is dominant, won't be going anywhere. So it shouldn't even try to compete with that. The unique selling point is the ad-free viewing, original file downloads and community aspect, as well as that laser focus on filmmaking & cinematography of all kinds. A niche site for artistic filmmakers that costs £60 per year ad-free, that isn't just another copy-n-paste YouTube or Frame.io is what's needed now! Any interest in gathering ideas for a crowdfunding?

The best bet for a YouTube alternative might be something a bit more decentralized. PeerTube have been around for a bit, but still haven't really taken off. Sorting by "global views" shows the most popular videos getting around 10k views. https://peertube.tv/ There are also options like Floatplane and Patreon, but their focus is more on people who will pay to follow a specific creator vs delivering a client gallery or similar. Finally, there are commercial services like Vidflow - no personal experience, but they're probably fine. Who knows how long they'll stay in business, though?

To host a large quantity of videos for streaming probably requires quite a bit of money and if there is no paywall then someone has to pay the bills and how to attract enough advertisers to cover them later. US has a lot of filthy rich people who can afford to arrange for these things to happen and take the risk. Europe spends its money taking care of people and so this money for investment is not as easily available unless funded by government or EU money. Since we don't want the business model to be based on data collection & IP theft, what would the business model be based on? Subscription doesn't work because US companies offer free services (but you are targed ads and your data is given to everyone somehow through intermediates and may be used for surveillance, political manipulation etc.) I think basic IT services (including video and photo hosting, forums, social media, basic tools) in Europe should be government funded or at least subsidized and all the infrastructure, code, and data must be located in Europe and preferably the code should be open source so that any manipulation or other illegality can be detected. And the platforms should be considered legally co-responsible for any illegal content or activities.

This is the problem with a closed, corporate owned web.

I would be up for that but SquareSpace would have to link to it as an option as I think they only currently link to Vimeo or YouTube for video? Could be why there are no other competitive other options out there?

Time for a UK / Europe Based Vimeo alternative then. Time to make our own.

Thanks for sharing your experience, I was looking to sell my gear and was wondering a better place than the regular ebay scam.. Well, it's look likes MPB is not better at all. Any possible alternative will be appreciated. Thanks