Streamanity review: The perfect escape from YouTube Armageddon

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Video content creators haven’t always had many options for their platforms. The most obvious one has been YouTube for the longest time, but it’s a fickle master, with changing algorithms and monetization through advertisers, who may decide they don’t like your content at a moment’s notice. Streamanity is the answer to this problem, with content that derives its financial incentives directly from the audience, and rewards its content creators in Bitcoin SV (BSV).

But to be a potential YouTube killer, Streamanity has to do a few things right. It has to stream high quality videos consistently and provide a platform that works, attract content creators that audiences will love, and then attract the audiences that can reward those content creators. Does Streamanity do that?

First off, videos on Streamanity work flawlessly. When you click a video, it loads very quickly with no buffering. That’s important; audiences aren’t going to want to stick around if they have to suffer a lot of buffering.

Otherwise, the platform has many of the creature comforts we’ve come to expect of a video site in 2019. Users can search for specific videos, check out what the latest releases are, check back on their history and browse their subscriptions. And in a win over YouTube, users can also check out clips, curated shorter videos; an idea that likely came from Twitch. There’s even a dark mode.

The only real fault of the platform I can note is the search feature. When searching for a video, you’ll get a drop down of results. That works, but it’s inferior to the search options YouTube can offer, due to their big brother Google being on board. It would be nice to have the ability to sort the search results and apply filters.

Now, how does Streamanity do at attracting content creators? That’s where the choice to monetize with BSV really shines. All videos are tagged with a price, ranging from $0.05 to an unlimited maximum. When a user views a video, the content creator will be paid based on how long they watched, with Streamanity getting a 20% cut. In the example the list in their help section, a $2.00 video watched 1000 times will net the content creator $1600. If Streamanity can gather even a fraction of YouTube’s audience, creators could start getting very rich, very quickly.

And jumping back to the clips feature; that benefits content creators as well. Using an example from the most recently posted clips, rather than watch Reina Nakamoto’s nearly 2 hour interview with Dr. Craig Wright for $3.00, you can watch a 5 minute clip focusing on a specific topic for $0.13. Reina gets paid either way, but the audience can jump to the content they want to see.

So that makes for a great revenue model for content creators, but what about audiences? I was all ready to deposit some BSV and get to watching content, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Streamanity gifts new users with $1.00 to start. That was plenty to start watching dance videos, educational BSV content, and even meditation videos.

Additionally, content creators, or big fans of them, can boost a video to really grow their audience. This feature allows anyone to pay for a video to be free for whatever the balance of the boost is, and features it on the boosted page. For new audiences looking for great content, this is a cool way to catch their eyes.

Streamanity incentives users too, in that if you share a video and it goes viral, the link you share will net you 10% of all the profit that video receives from your referral. For those who aren’t so great at making videos, but have the social following to make a video blow up, this is an outstanding feature.

The criticism I have, as far as attracting audiences go, is that the platform has very little content outside of Bitcoin and blockchain discussion. While there are the music and dance videos I mentioned, they are rare. This should be as easy as attracting more diverse content creators, which I hope they do. There’s no reason not to try the platform, after all, as uploading new content is free, and that $1.00 promo gets you started in a great way.

At the end of the day, Streamanity has everything you could ask for from a video platform. The videos play great, there’s economic incentive for creators, and it makes it as easy as possible for new users to get started. Having that combination is rare, even in 2019. That makes Streamanity a great way for BSV fans to earn and use their Bitcoin, and enjoy great content as they do.