Video preservation is more valuable to BSV

Let’s face it, building a video platform to rival YouTube will be an uphill battle. There are plenty of competitors already, but they only have a tiny fraction of YouTube’s market share. Why then would someone launch one that runs on BSV and stores its videos on the blockchain? BSVTube creator Patrick Phan has a few suggestions, and the main one is preservation. On-chain, you know your videos will be there forever. With that in mind, what kind of footage do you want to preserve?

Maybe it’s videos you once made for YouTube but got removed (or censored) for some reason. Maybe they’re just precious personal memories. Maybe classic movies that can’t be found anywhere else. Upload them to BSVTube, and they’re inscribed on the blockchain forever.

“A video stored on a blockchain is permanent, uncensorable, and owned by the person who put it there,” Phan wrote in a blog post. “No platform can take it down. No company can go bankrupt and take your content with it. No algorithm can suppress it. No terms of service can retroactively change what you’re allowed to say. It sits in the blockchain forever, accessible to anyone, controlled by no one.”

“That’s not a feature everyone needs. But for some use cases, it’s the only feature that matters.”

So even if BSVTube itself doesn’t exist a decade from now, videos uploaded to the BSV blockchain will be there somewhere. All the user needs to know is its on-chain location.

For a long time now, BSV users have noted that a massively scalable blockchain would be an ideal platform for uploading and storing video content. It’s resistant to censorship, content is permanent (at least, permanent in blockchain records), integration with wallets and tokenization provide more opportunities for creators to get paid for their work. It would be a great alternative to the advertising-backed content economies on most mainstream social media platforms.

So the challenge isn’t necessarily in the concept of “video on BSV,” but on the implementation side. For starters, it needs an interface that’s easy to use and works without delays or mysterious errors. This goes for both creators and viewers.

Secondly, it needs to be popular to be a viable business. Regardless of how well a video site works, creators will gravitate to the platforms that provide the potential for maximum reach. This explains YouTube’s popularity despite constant complaints about intrusive ads, channel deletions, and shadowbanning. Rivals like Rumble and Odysee have existed for years and are superior in many ways, but creators claim their viewership figures are minuscule compared to what they’d get on YouTube or Twitch.

Then there’s the issue of cost: even on a massively scalable blockchain network, it can get expensive to upload and store large amounts of data. HD videos are among the largest file types your average user can expect to handle.

According to Phan, a 1.8GB heritage movie costs only $0.50 to upload to BSVTube. Once it’s on-chain, there are no further maintenance fees like cloud services or server rental, at least for the uploader. The economics of this are bound to shift over time if transaction processors (miners) ever increase fees, or if fees are graded according to content type. And although on-chain storage is distributed, it’s still storage. Whether mining nodes will agree to keep all non-transaction-verification data on-chain forever remains a point of debate. Video data on BSVTube is stored in OP_RETURN.

BSVTube’s interface and usability

BSVTube launched with little fanfare around mid-January this year. Developer Phan has been adding features iteratively since then, starting with the bare-bones essentials and supplementing them with features like chat and categories. There’s a built-in BSV wallet that auto-generated a new address for us when we created an account.

There’s a “record” button that lets you record a video directly to the site with your connected camera, no other software required. BSV also aggregates videos from other platforms, and each thumbnail includes a tag indicating where it lives.

Otherwise, features familiar to any other video-hosting site are there. There are channels, live chats, subscriptions, comments, trending videos, and curators to follow. There’s a warning to anyone about to upload illegal content that blockchain records will tie them to their video forever, and address owners can be traced if necessary.

Overall, it’s looking pretty okay. There are still some rough edges to smooth out—videos are a little slow to start playing, and some features are “coming soon.” For a simple project built without major backing or a large dev team, though, it holds up pretty well. Phan is also the creator of Gateway wallet, designed to support an app ecosystem and to onboard new Bitcoin users.

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On-chain video storage as a value proposition for BSV

In his blog post, Phan noted that percentage changes in the market prices of BTC and BSV have moved almost in tandem over the past year. This is despite the vast differences between these two digital assets in name recognition, market cap, and actual utility.

This indicates, he said, the market values have nothing to do with fundamentals like technology, scalability, or transaction throughput. Both are being traded by algorithmic trading bots using similar arbitrage strategies, index trackers, and market makers hedging BSV against BTC. None of this is healthy and shows that neither asset shows independent demand from actual (i.e., non-speculative) users.

“The correlation is the absence of utility. It’s what a market looks like when nobody actually needs the asset to do anything. The price is being set entirely by machines trading against each other, referencing nothing except each other.”

How does this relate to BSVTube and on-chain video? The answer is due to scaling limitations on other blockchain networks; no one has really thought about it. Other blockchains don’t have the capacity for that. Even if they did, the network fees would make it prohibitive.

Sites like BSVTube, even if they’re used only to archive videos and films that might otherwise be lost to time, demonstrate a real-world use case for BSV over other blockchains. If enough people use it that way, said Pham, the BSV price may decouple from its unofficial algo-trading peg.

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