How NTV works
Streaming without the leash — and the reasoning behind every part of it.
Not now, not later
Viewers never see an ad here. That isn't a courtesy — it's the load-bearing decision. Advertisers are what force platforms to police speech: demonetisation is almost never the platform's morals, it's brand safety demands from someone selling soda. No advertisers means no advertiser pressure, which is the only reason the rules below can stay put.
Written down in advance
Every platform claims it supports free expression, then enforces policy nobody can predict. NTV publishes exactly what gets removed — what the law requires, and what payment processors require. That's the entire list. If something isn't on it, it stays up, and the list changes in public or not at all.
You keep what you earn
Tips and gift subs check out through Square — card fees only, no platform cut on top. Per-creator payout accounts are next; until then settlements go through the platform Square account, not a balance you have to cash out of NTV. Twitch takes half of a sub. Here the cut is the card network, not us.
Chat in the same moment
WebRTC playback at sub-second latency — under a second glass-to-glass instead of the 8 to 15 you’re used to, with low-latency HLS as the automatic fallback. Chat reacts while the thing is still happening, which is the entire point of watching live rather than watching a clip.
How this pays for itself
Most platforms won't tell you where the money comes from. Since the whole pitch here is that nothing is hidden, here's the entire model:
- Viewers pay nothing and see nothing — No ads, no paywall, no account required to watch.
- Creators cover their own delivery — Video costs about 2.7 GB per viewer per hour to serve. A flat monthly fee covers roughly 1,100 viewer-hours — enough for a channel averaging around nine concurrent viewers, streaming most days.
- Earnings skip us entirely — Tips and gift subs go through Square. We don't take a platform cut on top of card fees, and we don't sit on a creator balance.
- Big channels pay a share instead of a fee — Past a certain size the bandwidth genuinely costs more than a flat fee covers. At that point it becomes a percentage of what you earn here — which you can only be charged if you're already being paid.
If that stops working, we'll say what changed and what we're doing about it. What we won't do is quietly add advertising and then quietly start enforcing what advertisers want.
What NTV is right now
Honest status: this is early. Ingest, per-channel keys, low-latency playback, unified chat, following, and Square tips / gift subs are live. Streams are recorded automatically and show up on the channel when they end. Per-creator payout accounts are the next money piece. If you want in early and can live with rough edges, that is exactly who this is for.
- Ingest
- RTMP with per-channel keys
- Playback
- Low-latency HLS, ~2–4s · VOD after you go live
- Payments
- Square — tips and gift subs