No one in their right mind would dare question the influence YouTube has on the Web, but at the same time, that means content creators must adapt to its rules, or discover the hard way that they cannot monetize videos. YouTube's situation would be better if it had solid competition, and that thought leads us to the doors of BitChute, an alternative based on BitTorrent technology.
A billion monthly visitors, a disturbing number of hours of video uploaded, famous youtubers moving millions of dollars… yes, YouTube is a monster. Second most visited site on the Internet according to Alexa, just behind Google's search engine. But not everything that glitters is gold in that service. The "Great YouTuber Chaos of 2016" angered many creators because they couldn't monetize their videos, or discovered that their previous videos no longer showed ads. The situation was very confusing, but it made clear the gigantic power YouTube holds. In an era that confronts political correctness, advertisers' desires, and freedom of speech, YouTube suddenly doesn't seem like the most appropriate platform. That's when BitChute comes in.
The goal of BitChute is to become a direct alternative to YouTube, or at least that is what its founder Ray Vahey indicates. He also added that creating a YouTube clone is not the answer due to low odds of success, and if it registered good growth, it would become an organization similar to YouTube, with its same problems. A critical point for any project with these characteristics is the bandwidth-hosting combo. The solution of BitChute is to use WebTorrent, that is, BitTorrent over WebRTC. Creators can share videos directly from their browsers without advanced settings, and all users of BitChute become small hosts.
BitChute has a long road ahead, but in our brief visit it worked quite well. Obviously, any platform is only as good as its content, so we hope that some youtubers decide to share their content through this route, whether as an experiment, as a method of protest, or with the intention of attracting a new audience.
