This is a tech update on Brighteon.com, the YouTube alternative video platform that dares to respect free speech. If you've been following Brighteon news, you may already know that the video platform was threatened with being de-platformed by upstream infrastructure providers in the aftermath of the New Zealand mass shooting (which was, of course, engineered to set off a global religious war against Christians as we've now seen with the Sri Lanka bombings, but that's another story altogether).
Because of the extreme censorship threats against Brighteon, we were forced to delete videos that showed footage from the Christchurch shootings. Otherwise, the entire video platform was going to be annihilated and we would have lost the ability to host any videos at all. Even now, some ISPs in Australia and New Zealand have completely banned all videos from Brighteon.
Even as that was happening, we were already well into the R&D effort to rebuild our platform to make it more resistant to censorship threats. I'm happy to report that we are now approaching the completion of that effort, and the rolling out of Brighteon 2.0 is scheduled to take place in early June.
This new infrastructure is already functioning in all the ways necessary for hosting a video site:
- Video uploading and transcoding into multiple bitrate renditions
- Video storage that's affordable (our new solution saves us 90% compared to our previous costs)
- Video playback across multiple devices and browsers
All of this is now working internally, and it's going to be rolled out soon as part of Brighteon 2.0.
Lifting the restrictions on certain types of content
Once this new infrastructure is rolled out, we will be able to lift restrictions on content which is currently not allowed. For example, the Christchurch shooting video footage — which is historically important for researchers to view because of all the anomalies contained in the footage — will once again be able to be posted.
We will also be lifting the current ban on video game footage, which we had previously disallowed due to the very high storage costs that were causing us to lose a considerable amount of money each month. Now, with a 90% reduction in storage costs, we will once again be able to host videos which otherwise would not have been financially feasible, such as videos of people playing video games (which I still don't understand, by the way, since it seems crazy to spend time watching other people play video games when you could be playing them yourself).
Watch Brighteon.com for the official announcement about the version 2.0 rollout, coming soon.
The big news: Twitter-like functionality coming to Brighteon by late 2019
Here's the biggest news in all this: We will be announcing Twitter-like functionality on Brighteon.com later this year, transforming the video platform into a social media platform with video capabilities.
This new feature set will allow all account owners to not only post videos, but also to post short text messages containing hyperlinks.
Users who follow specific channels will see all text messages and new videos from those channels on their own Brighteon home pages. In other words, when a user logs in, they will see their personalized "wall" of new content, populated from the channels they are following. That content will consist of new videos, and new text messages. Users can also post their own messages or reply to videos (i.e. comment on videos), or reply to text messages they have received.
Importantly, there will be no shadowbanning, EVER. Brighteon will leave it up to each user to decide which channels to follow or stop following. It is not appropriate, we believe, for any tech company to decide what you want to read or watch. That's your choice.
Sign up now at Brighteon.com to reserve your channel name (it's free to join). You can begin posting videos immediately, or you can just reserve your account and sit on it until we launch our social media features later this year.
There are a few commonsense exceptions to the free speech nature of the platform, of course, such as the fact that Brighteon is not appropriate for pornographic material, or illegal material, or snuff videos, etc. And we will offer more explicit definitions of those topics as we move forward. Obviously, Brighteon must comply with U.S. law as well, which means we actively ban videos that call for violence against individuals, or that promote stalking behavior against individuals, etc.
Live video streaming has been indefinitely postponed
On the down side of all this, we have indefinitely postponed plans to support live video streaming. It turns out that live streaming is impossible to sufficiently moderate to avoid malicious actors from exploiting the live streaming to get the domain permanently banned everywhere.
For example, a malicious actor (i.e. a Trump hater, anti-Christian demonic minion, etc.) could simply live stream themselves murdering animals or viewing illegal pornographic material, for example, and then claim that our platform "allowed" them to do that.
So live streaming has been postponed until we can figure out a way to protect the platform from malicious users.
Our goal: To support all speech that is protected by the First Amendment
Much like Gab, which has led the way on free speech for social media, our goal is to provide a platform for all speech that is protected by the First Amendment, including speech that some people decide to categorize as "offensive."
We are working diligently to insulate ourselves from the increasing scourge of censorship by infrastructure providers and ISPs, and we have a multi-domain strategy that will be announced later which will segment Brighteon videos to different domains based on the topics they cover.
The tech giants have already tried to destroy Brighteon, but they have so far failed. Meanwhile, we are pumping more R&D money into the platform to make it stronger and more able to resist attacks.
Brighteon.com already hosts over 100,000 videos that have been uploaded by thousands of users. Visit Brighteon.com now to check out the new videos that are posted each hour.
Also, for the record, Brighteon supports Gab.com and all platforms that promote the freedom to speak and think. In fact, as we move forward, we will attempt to work with Gab on social media integration measures that are technically feasible.
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