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Doesn't this compete fairly directly with Patreon? Patreon allows some hosting, interacting with the creators directly, and of course taking payments.
As someone who uses Floatplane and Pareon (viewer, not producer), I strongly prefer Floatplane.

Patreon is fine as a donation platform, but it's mediocre for content delivery.

As a long-time viewer of LTT, I also trust them more with their content moderation policies.

It looks to me to be an ad free hybrid of youtube and patreon. Its primary focus is video delivery, monetized via subscription. They go over some of the bandwidth numbers in the video.
It seems like it's meant to compete with both Patreon and Vimeo. Issues with the website CSS aside, I hope it succeeds.
Compared to pateron it would be interesting to know what the cut is between floatplane and the creator.
They have a video explaining their video hosting platform on a competing video hosting platform?
They specifically say in that video that Floatplane is not a competitor of YouTube.
They have millions of subscribers on YouTube that they want to migrate
Do they have the ability to host videos?

I'm not seeing a live demo of their player.

They do, they've been dogfeeding on their own platforms for quite a while now.

One of the main advantages that I've heard people talk about is the high bit rates, making their 1080p look smoother than YouTube 4k in some cases.

Somewhat strange that they lack a free video preview of the quality of the website, but that might just be because launching a service like this with a high quality video front and center might ruin their networking when a giant wave of new people come in.

Youtube compresses to 2.4Mbps inclusive of audio for H.264 1080P, which really shouldn't be a problem if the video uploaded was clean and high bitrate in the first place.

I think another reason was Youtube did not support uploading of HEVC content until fairly recently, that has cause lot of problem especially those shoot their video with their iPhone.

And Youtube may never transcode and support the playback of HEVC content. Which means you are stuck with 1080P for Apple's users.

The quality of the content strongly depends on the video material. Leaves in the wind on the background of a video can quickly cause a drop in video quality. Animation, on the other hand, is usually fine with Youtube's presets. The result also seems to depend on the input format and how well Youtube's software deals with it. Many old videos made in a special Flash format suddenly turned choppy and ugly when Youtube changed something on their backend and as far as I know, that has been the case ever since.

As for HEVC, not supporting is makes sense. The cost of licensing all of Youtube's encoder and decoder systems would probably make a small dent in server cost; more than storage for H.264 content of the same length and quality would cost. For example, some versions of H.265 have a $0.02 cost per disc/title. Serving 5 billion videos (titles) each day, such a codec could easily sink the company. Of course, this is just one example of the codec licensing, and the pricing depends per region (which adds another layer of paperwork) so real pricing won't be that steep, but it's not going to be cheap to switch to HEVC playback.

Youtube has moved to VP9 and is seemingly going for AV1 as its preferred future video codec. VP9 and HEVC are pretty close when it comes to compression performance in many real world videos.

I honestly did know or even expect that Apple devices don't support VP9, but I don't blame Google for sticking to an open codec instead of giving in to Apple and their bet on HEVC for corporate contacts, especially when the codecs are this close in regards to performance.

> shouldn't be a problem

Anecdotally, videos streamed from Vimeo (which offers far superior bitrates to YouTube) look considerably better than YouTube.

> that might just be because launching a service like this with a high quality video front and center might ruin their networking when a giant wave of new people come in.

If that's the case, they're not up to the task of hosting a video that goes viral.

Whatever the explanation, the absence of a demo video leaves a very bad impression.

Let them breath a little for god sake. Yeah they aren't up to the task of hosting a video that goes viral, for two simple reasons, first they are way too new to have the kind of infrastructure to support that and second, it's not even the goal of the platform.

This is not a free video hosting website, this is only allowing paid subscription. If something goes viral enough enough paid subscriber watch it, I'm pretty sure that the amount paid by theses subscribers will be more than enough to support that wave. Having more channels will certainly make theses peaks smaller too, and that will only happens once they grow bigger.

they do