Just to begin with, I think none of those question should be asked about any specific instance (Gleev/l1.media) as they are all generic to Atlas/Orion/Joystream. Remember that Gleev is just Atlas, with some settings tweaked.
How does Gleev count video views?
It's a very simple mechanism. Whenever Atlas user starts video playback, request is sent to Orion that says "I've watched video X" and Orion increments the view count for this video in its database. This is kind of a placeholder solution until something better is available. This issue was discussed many times (Joystream/atlas#539, https://discord.com/channels/811216481340751934/812345044094156811/971774064962195466). This is far from ideal because anyone can easily send this request to Orion, spoofing a video view. To solve this properly something like Gateway Accounts (Joystream/atlas#1388) would be needed and that needs Orion v2. If what you're looking for is a way to estimate gateway's usage so they can be paid, something more feasible short-term may be mechanism described here - Joystream/joystream#4307. Basically, whenever a channel/video gets created in Atlas, there would be some data set that indicates in which gateway that content was created. This way, you could reward gateways by the number of channels/videos that were created in them. We would need to ask JSG what is the progress on this but when I was leaving this was already worked on and I don't expect it to take too much time.
Does Gleev have any protection against manipulating video counts using bots and scripts?
Like explained above, it doesn't have any protection. Currently it's very easy to manipulate those. If you really wanted to rely on views, one improvement could be to add some kind of a rate-limiting mechanism to Orion so that you can only add 100 views / IP address / day or something along those lines. This would still not be very trustworthy though.
Does Gleev provide any insights into what part of the video gets the most viewers' attention?
No, Atlas doesn’t have anything like that.
Do you think it's feasible and appropriate to integrate video ads into Gleev/Atlas?
Well, Gleev is controlled by JSG so it’s their decision whether they want ads in their gateway, same as it will be for every gateway operator. Atlas currently doesn’t support that, and while certainly possible to add this functionality, it probably wouldn’t be an easy task.
Is it possible to have DRM-protected content on Gleev/Atlas? (Think Coursera, or Udemy video courses)
No, Atlas currently doesn’t support that. I think we are far away from that to be honest, first step would be server-side processing of video assets which is a complex feature on its own.
In its current state, how can Gleev be used to generate revenue by a video blogger, other than by selling video NTFs and soliciting donations?
There will be 2 additional mechanisms for generating revenue other than NFTs and donation, but those aren’t available yet:
- Council payouts - this is very close to being finished, this allows council to pay content creators at scale
- Creator tokens - this is still quite far from being done, but once live, creator will be able to issue their own tokens and sell them for revenue
Can Gleev video NFTs be listed on other NFT platforms?
This question should be “Can Gleev Joystream video NFTs be listed on other NFT platforms?”, since the NFTs are operated on the blockchain level. But the answer is no, currently Joystream NFTs are not interoperable with any other NFT system sadly 😟
Do you have any suggestion on why would a content creator want to issue their creator tokens?
Like mentioned above, it’s an additional way for them to capture revenue from their community. It’s even more than that, this lets community invest in the channel - it will be possible for creators to share their channel revenue with the token holders. So, as a user, if you find a creator you believe in, it may be a good idea to buy their token, hoping that in the future:
- The token will be worth more and can be sold for profit,
- The channel will earn a lot of revenue (e.g. NFTs, council payouts) and some share of that revenue will go to token holders.
Can you propose a way to protect Gleev-like apps from spam uploads?
I think it will be ultimately up to the gateway operators (JSG for Gleev) to figure this out, I don’t think it’s possible to launch any generic system. I would guess that to begin with, it will depend mostly on manual curation and picking content that doesn’t match specific vertical (crypto-related for Gleev). Once we actually see some spam, then we could think about ways to automate this process. However, I don’t think “spam protection” is actually a very important aspect. Keep in mind, that in order to upload anything you need to pay blockchain and storage fees which are already kind of a spam protection. It’s not bad if there’s a lot of low-quality videos on the platform - they will just not get popular and be forgotten about.
How feasible would it be to add a support for live video streaming?
It’s not very feasible. This would require a lot of changes in the blockchain runtime, storage network and apps. It would be a big endeavour.
Gleev seems to be lacking the basic end-user features: watch history, "Save to watch later", looped playback. How feasible is to add these in the reference implementation?
Again, this should be about Atlas. It’s quite feasible to add those, keeping in mind that until Gateway Accounts mentioned above are introduced, any user state will be local to their browser. However, it would be best to coordinate with JSG on features like these since they have designers available that could help tremendously with this work.