Today I received an email from Cinnamon.video team telling that they are planning to shut down their service in February.
I'm not a video content creator and don't usually use their platform, but hearing this quite a shock to me since they are one of the top project ever involved in Web Monetization. And the fact that they never growing out from BETA phase make it even more saddening. Very sad to hear that it doesn't work out for them.
Top comments (6)
Yeah it is unfortunate, but they hadn't put any resources into the tool for almost two years. I think actually them officially pulling the plug is better than being a ghost. You can actually put a payment pointer into YouTube and there is a plugin for WM in PeerTube. I am sure @nicol has some thoughts.
Always a bit sad when a creative startup stops, they had lots of energy for a while, but good as Chris says they stopped rather than pretended. It's tough. For almost 15 years, the online freeview video space has only been getting more centralised, with just TikTok (portrait) and Instagram (square) offering any competition to YouTube's monopoly of landscape-mode video in this time (obvs you can say TikTok's success is down to moderation, creator tools and stronger global reach for non-anglo / music-led content, but it also gives viewers more video without rotating their phone!).
Peertube potentially changes this as it's a pathway to a decentralized video ecosystem. This is similar to the Participatory Culture Foundation's vision from ~15 years ago to do video over RSS from Broadcast Machine to the Miro Player (they ended up just focusing on Amara for subtitling). There's a parallel universe where this did for decentralised video what iTunes Podcast index did for podcasting!
But Activity Pub has a lot of advantages over RSS, and we didn't have WebRTC or WebTorrent back in 2010. Still, running a PeerTube instance isn't without its costs and legally/reputationally/ethically the risks around illegal/harmful content seem much higher than with text/photos. It'll be interesting to see if Vimeo follows Medium onto the Fediverse as that's the only other video web app model that seems proven to work online – ie creator-paid, no ads, help makers monetise. But it seems a while since Vimeo have done much sensible.
By the way we did fund experimentation with WM plugins for PeerTube. Work was lead by @miles here is the final grant report: community.interledger.org/miles/we...
We are looking at the Fediverse with help from @jeremiah and @ericahargreave
It's a really nice plugin. We used it on our Peertube testbed open.movie – it has lots of neat features.
We would have used it with the films we put up for last year's Mozfest Web Monetization experiment – even making payment pointers for the filmmakers without one. But we were advised by US lawyers that even though we had permission from the filmmakers –and would give all the money to them– because their works were Creative Commons Non-Commercial it was advisable not to monetize them.
What a thoughtful, detail rich response. Thank you @nicol