You’d need an operating system that uses it. It’s going to be at least as difficult as flashing a custom rom, but likely even more so, as there might not be a ready-made build. Definitely something to experiment with on a secondary phone. PostmarketOS is your best bet, here are others that support Plasma Mobile.

Income and viewers are the same egg. You can put up sponsor segments but they’re no good if nobody is watching.

That does sound like it would help.

I mean that’s true but I don’t think that’s part of the chicken and egg cycle, as you can improve UX before getting users too

It’s a chicken and egg issue for sure, but I think you’ve got the wrong egg.

Nobody will create content on a platform with few viewers. Nobody will be a viewer on a platform with few content creators.

Yes. But it used to be free to watch remotely. It’s 99% your own hardware doing everything. Their services get used for discovery, not as proxies for the connection itself, AFAIK.

You already had to pay them to allow transcoding with your own GPU, etc.

Right now it’s still not too bad, but just watch, enshittification will affect paid users too. For one, I expect the lifetime pass to go away, and go away retroactively eventually.