develop the vip membership idea
I can fully appreciate that the pre-download back-end stream rendering required for 1080 HD is extremely time-and-resource intensive (I have some limited experience with hd audio/video stream encoding myself so I know what this involves).
The latest captcha and vip account options are good, and will certainly discourage automated mass-downloading. I would favor this over ad-marketing which I understand has been removed from the latest versions, however this must have impacted on your funding to maintain the quality back-end servers that are required for both stream-rendering and high-capacity bandwidth provision.
I would support the idea of presenting an option for end-users to pay a small subscription to unlock longer 1080 HD downloads, on the understanding that the fee would be reasonable, and that the plug-in would remain completely free with the 20 minute cap kept in place for light and casual users of 1080 downloads.
This would, of course, also imply that the lower quality downloads remain permanently free, providing that Youtube do not also convert their other streams to the new format...
This small optional subscription would certainly help to fund the back-end equipment needed to support the vast amounts of hd rendering requests that are presented from thousands of Youtube Users every hour, and should also help in some small way to maintain the generous bandwidth that this plug-in offers to end-users.
Steve, first of all thanks a lot for understanding the issue and sharing it with everybody. It is getting harder to continue keeping this service alive with ever increasing traffic and almost non-existent donation support. I was thinking about working on a premium membership system solution and will update this thread when something comes up.
BTW, I would like users to vote this up who are willing to enroll into this and also get their recommendation about what could be a feasible monthly membership cost for such service.
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AdminVideoDroid (Mr, VideoDroid) commented
The costing for server you sent does not holds up as we are experiencing a exponential growth, just to give you an idea here is a bandwidth chart of past 24 Hours from one of the two servers we are using right now with this limitation.
http://i.imgur.com/LKpgU8C.png
I am thinking of implementing a daily quota system, say 3GB/daily for free users (no captcha) and then more tiers as per users need. What do you say?
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Steve commented
Hi, Steve again...
I can see that there has been very little feedback so far so I thought I would drop by and try to
boost things up a bit with regards to monthly subscription amounts. A bit of a long post but bear
with me...
First, a little maths observation for the readers of this post ;)
I just checked out a quick google search for the costings on high bandwidth servers, and I see
that they can cost anything from around $200 up to around $400 _per month_, which gives 10Gb
unmetered bandwidth (just an example, some servers may cost a lot more)
I am not sure of the server set-up for Easy Youtube Video Downloader Express, however the cost of
running it and maintaining it is probably going to be in the same ball-park.
Now if just 20 people donated $10 per month, that would give $200 per month towards server costs.
If 40 people donated just $5 per month, then that would also total $200. If 100 people donated
just $2 per month then that would also total $200.
Following this progression, the more people that donate, the less each individual person will have
to pay, until the final target is reached. For example if 200 people donated just $2 per month,
then $400 will be received to cover server costs.
I am certain that there are more than 200 people across the world using a youtube download
service, and I am fairly certain that there are more than 200 people using this particular
downloader.
Therefore, if only a small percentage of the total people using this service actually donated no
more that $5 each, the amount received to support the server would be more than adequate, or would
at least go a long way to covering the monthly running costs of the server.
Keeping in mind that even if this monthly subscription is optional, when it is run side-by-side
with the current option of donating a "one-off" NON-subscription amount, there should be enough
people donating over the course of a month to cover a large part of the monthly costs involved in
running a high quality, high bandwidth server for millions of youtube users, whilst still keeping
it free to use for the majority of low-quality-video requests.
Remember that the fees involved are aimed at supporting the huge number of requests received for
downloading HD 1080p videos, which require back-end stream encoding and which required a large
bandwidth to transfer to the end-user, especially when the length of the video is very long.
Nobody likes waiting for slow data transfer, and at the present time this version of the Youtube
Downloader has a very fast download time with low ping-rates.
It is there for your convenience, please support it ;)
I hope that this presents a compelling argument to anybody reading this, apologies for the length
of the post.